Tag Archives: people

The Morning After in Europe

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So it’s done. We have four more years of George W Bush to look forward to. A quick tour of the American blogs shows a few trying to pull some sort of moral victory from this election, but the truth is that they’ve lost everything. Not only has the president finally won the majority denied to him in 2000, but as a reward for his mismanagement and incompetence, Democrats have actually lost seats in both houses of Congress, including losing the Senate Minority Leader. For all that the vote is close, the outcome is a stunning defeat in terms of real access to power. There is no longer a meaningful opposition in the US able to moderate the power of a president who needs no longer worry about reelection.

At best, this means that in 2008 the Republicans will have to run on a deeper quagmire in Iraq, no meaningful victories in the so-called war on terrorism, another huge hike in the American public debt and all the new messes Bush can create. But, let’s be honest. That isn’t going to happen. No one will be called to account. The American electorate, for a number of reasons, simply will not hold this administration to account. They did not do so in 2002, they haven’t this time, and there is no reason to think they will in 2008.

Reaction in the French political scene is muted, but definitely not happy.
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Bowling for Cubberley (Free Music Inside!)

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Usually, it’s impossible to argue with people who make comparisons between the incumbent US administration and various past totalitarian systems, particularly when the argument turns to a comparison between George W Bush and the Austrian guy with the Charlie Chaplin moustache. Whatever you think of George W Bush and his administration – still a mystery to many people in the US as well as abroad – he’s no Hitler, and the US are still a largely liberal democracy – albeit a deeply divided and angst-ridden one with a progressively eroding system of common values.


A regular guy from Texas.Though I hope to the contrary, I believe the weeks following the US Presidential election will become a much bigger electoral and legal debacle than most commentators are willing to admit now. In the end, this election might well become a testament of the principal current American weakness – deep social and partisan divisions, if not outright hatred between the camps. American politics now appears to consist predominantly of conceptually empty labels – very soon even rituals of Patriotism may be exposed as nothing more than a band aid for a mentally and spiritually ailing nation.
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Hobbits among us

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It seems the big science news today is the discovery of a new species of homind in a dig on Flores Island in Indonesia. Homo floresiensis, who apparently was about a metre tall apparently lived as recently as 13,000 years ago – much more recently than any known homnid other than humans, and there is already speculation that they survived much more recently. It seems that some people on Flores still tell stories of little people who lived in caves at the time of the arrival of the Dutch 400 years ago. This leads one to speculate that the less well expored areas of Flores, and perhaps other islands in eastern Indonesia, may still hold pockets of little people.

BBC is already calling them “hobbits”.
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Scary Reading.

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For all its amazing sensoric and analytical abilities, more often than not the human mind is simply overwhelmed with the world’s complexity, confused by its uncertainty. Philosophers have dreamed of an easy life without the pain inflicted by their insatiable urge to reflect, to question everything, to leave no stone unturned.

Of course, no philosopher is needed to understand that such a tendency is not necessarily helpful when it comes to making decisions. A good decision today is usually preferable to an optimal one at some unspecified time in the future. However, the opposite – confidence to decide appropriately that is not founded on facts – is at least as bad, and probably worse. Balancing reflection and decisiveness based on intuition or ideological determination is above all important for political leadership.

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Suspicion and divided loyalties

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Perhaps the most damaging effect of 9/11 and all that has followed will be its role in making divided loyalties one of the most dangerous things a person can have. From the beginning, while the ruins of the World Trade Center were still burning, any effort to hold non-trivial positions about terrorism and Islam were attacked. People opposed to the war in Iraq were branded as terrorist supporters, people unimpressed by a programme of reform in the Middle East imposed at the end of a gun were castigated, people who asked questions about whether there was more to things than “they hate us for our freedom” were branded as traitors.

Tariq Ramadan wrote a piece in Wednesday’s New York Times which must be read in this light. The key paragraph – the statement of where he stands – appears at the end:

I believe Western Muslims can make a critical difference in the Muslim majority world. To do this, we must become full, independent Western citizens, working with others to address social, economic and political problems. However, we can succeed only if Westerners do not cast doubt on our loyalty every time we criticize Western governments. Not only do our independent voices enrich Western societies, they are the only way for Western Muslims to be credible in Arab and Islamic countries so that we can help bring about freedom and democracy. That is the message I advocate. I do not understand how it can be judged as a threat to America.

But it is not that hard to see the threat in it. To encourage western Muslims to at once see themselves as having a place in the West and a role in the Islamic world is tantamount to asking them to divide their loyalties. To all too many people right now, divided loyalties are a synonym for treason. The charge of divided loyalties is an old one, and a very damaging one. It was once the most mainstream charge that people made against Jews. To see it revived today – against Muslims in Europe, against Mexicans in the US by the likes of Samuel Huntington, and yes, against Jews in many countries – is very, very troubling.
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Blogging as Substitute?

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Dr. Bernd Marcus, Prof. Dr. Astrid Sch?tz und Dipl.-Psych. Franz Machilek are psychology scholars at the Technical University Chemnitz and probably know everything you always wanted to know about bloggers yet never dared to ask. Or so. Well, actually, I don’t know if bloggers were a particularly important part of their study given the saddening size of the German blogosphere.

Based on 266 questionnaires which the psychologists gathered online they assessed intentions and personality traits of people who own a homepage to answer the question whether “owners of personal websites” are “self-presenters, or people like you and me”. So the question of what exactly differentiates a “personal website” from a blog – as well as the entire “social software” discussion – might be spiced up a little from a psychological point of view.
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Daniel Pipes on Tariq Ramadan: Why French literacy still matters

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Readers of my previous comment on Tariq Ramadan will no doubt have come away with the impression that I don’t much like Daniel Pipes. This is not an entirely accurate assessment of my opinon of him. I think Pipes is an unreconstructed bigot and xenophobic fanatic whose academic work fails to meet even the lowest standards of scholarship, whose career has been built on politically driven attacks, and who has set up with his “Campus Watch” as a terrorist front designed to intimidate academics and ensure that there is as little debate, discussion or rational thought on Israel, US foreign policy or Islam as possible. His reseach and scholarship are not intended to better inform action but to support specific agendas, usually revolving around hating some foreign force or people. Instead of fostering debate, his work is intended to intimidate. Pipes advocates religiously targetted surveillance, he supports making federal university funding conditional on ideology, and he has helped to terrorise professors who are named on his website. In short, I think Pipes is swine.

He is a second generation right-wing tool, the son of one of the men most responsible for America’s “Team B”, which grossly overblew the Soviet menace in the 70s and 80s – causing massive US defense spending and resulting deficits – and complained that anyone with a better sense of reality was soft on communism. Normally, Pipes’ parentage would constitute poor grounds for condeming him as having a pathological relationship to facts. But keep this in mind, since it constitutes one of his arguments against Ramadan.

All you need is Google to find out why I think these things about Daniel Pipes. It’s not a lot of work. His own website provides ample examples.

But, today, I will be targeting something a little more specific. Pipes has put up on his website his comment on Tariq Ramadan’s visa denial, originally published in the New York Post on Friday. In it, he makes specific points against Tariq Ramadan, linking, in some cases, to articles on the web in support. These articles are primarily in French. As a service to our non-francophone readers, we will be translating the relevant sections, since they lead one to the conclusion that Pipes assumes his readers will just take his word on their contents.

We report, you decide.
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Digitally Scared.

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No doubt about it – revolutions are truly scary. Whether you think of the French one, the ones that freed Eastern Europe, or the digital revolution that is currently changing much of the transactional structure of our economies, and in particular the music industry. But contrary to most people, I do pity major label executives who never even stood a chance of understanding just what happened to them. After all, this is an industry where the average person?s desk had not seen a computer in 1996, as some insider once said.

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Interpreting Spain’s Election Results

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By now virtually everyone must know the results of the Spanish elections. I suppose the real questions people are asking involve how to interpret them. I would advise against jumping to hasty conclusions here. I picked up one comment on Crooked Timber to the effect that:

“anybody who decided to vote Socialist after the bombings presumably expected that the Socialists would reverse the government?s Iraq policy and do less in the war on terror than the government was likely to do.?

I think this view is a mistake, and doesn’t reveal much understanding about the dynamic of Spainsh politics over the last decade.
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