The Blog Without A Name
A
good reminder of the ridiculous situations that result from ecclesiastics and the state getting in bed together. An atheist pastor; Catholics being forced to register in Lutheran churches; Muslims being forbidden from
effectively practicing their religion by driving down the supply of available places of worship, and thus driving up their price. Do the people of Denmark value sentimentality so highly that these are seen as the necessary cost of doing business?
It irritates me when people call the current US Supreme Court strongly biased in one way or another, given how flexible this court has proven to be over the years. If anything it is a (moderate)
libertarian court: it has whittled away at Congressional, presidential, and even State powers over a wide variety of economic
and social practices: it defends the rights of employers with respect to job-related injuries, but tells states they can't be flippant about executions or mistreat homosexuals
qua homosexuals. As such, it doesn't fit into the conservative/liberal mould very well at all.
Here's a good precis of Sandra Day O'Connor's role in shaping the current court.
Yes,
you too can be an ethnic bigot!
There has long been profound pressure on the part of European elites to express a kind of Euro-nationalism in response to American hegemony, but it's increasingly no longer being kept under wraps. Given how openly people like Romano Prodi speak of "balancing" the US, it's not entirely surprising that the Bush administration has changed its stated policy on European integration to one of "disaggregation", as a French delegation was recently shocked to learn. It's in the narrowly perceived self-interest of the US elites, as with any political entity, to ensure compliant clients. It should not be surprising that the EU can play this game, too; witness EU treatment of
Tony Blair and eastern European leaders during the war. The only difference between the US and EU in this respect is precisely the lack of EU organizational capacity to resist US pressure, and as the EU integrates, as I think is more or less inevitable at this point, we can look forward to decades of conflict between the EU and US as they try as institutions to satisfy their constituents. Hopefully, it will only with rarity come to the surface, and so only with rarity be impossible to ignore popular bigotries against the Other Side.
Just when you think you couldn't imagine yourself voting other than Democrat in the next election, Dick Gephardt up and does something like
this. I mean, it's not like there aren't many Republicans who have such a cavalier disregard for civil rights and constitutionalism (look at Ashcroft), but how could the Dems possibly differentiate themselves from the Republicans in this way?
Yet
another view of European (or, more properly, EU) insouciance over the plight of third-world farmers. What is even more irritating about this policy is that it doesn't even help prop up French cultural traditions, since most of the CAP goes to vast, industrial estates.
This is just great*. This is exactly what I would do if I were determined to push Israel into the sea: invoke the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Despite the fact that it has long been known a forgery, one of the current leaders of Hamas is not convinced by the skeptics.
The Guardian article puts it well:
"So what on earth is [the
Protocols] doing in the twenty-first century manifesto of an Islamic movement? The Covenant says that 'the Zionists' want an Israel that extends from Cairo to Basra, and then next stop, the world. 'Their plan,' says Mr Rantisi's Covenant, 'is embodied in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.' Rantisi is serious and measured.... 'When I first heard about this document,' says Rantisi reasonably, 'I didn't want to believe it, but then I saw what was happening in Palestine, and I could see that it was genuine.' That is his answer. It was also (and this is no cheap point) Hitler's answer. In
Mein Kampf, the future Führer allowed that many people thought that the
Protocols were a forgery. He was sure they embodied the truth. 'The best criticism applied to them,' he said, 'is reality.'"
You know, the Israeli government, what with its policy of extrajudicial killings and all, isn't exactly free of blood on its hands, either. But world domination? And weird blood-rituals? Freemasons? I mean, come on. If you're going to be an anti-Semitic bigot, then the least you could do is be more creative about it. You know things are getting bad in the Muslim world when they make late 19th century Vienna look paradaisically tolerant.
*(It is well to remember that irony is
not marked on these pages.)
Want to know why Texas government is so minimalist? It's not (just) ideology. Mechanisms like
this one divide decision-making authority between a broad range of political agents, and thus the budgets and policies tend to go for the lowest common denominator.
True to form,
The Independent execrates yet another American policy:
subsidies for cotton farmers. This one, however,
should be execrated: price-distorting subsidies of any kind are just a way to divert the ultimate cost from one group to another, in this case from relatively rich people to relatively desperately poor people. Do the people of Mali, or any other Third World country, really need this?
It's really too bad that globalization is so maligned. Of course, one reason it's maligned is because it
is bad for those whom it affects. People in developing countries working in globalized industries
do usually have to work in wretched working conditions and
do get a fraction of what people doing the same job in rich countries get. The catch, though, is that the people who are not working in globalized industries work in even
more wretched and
worse paying jobs, in some cases, many times more wretched and worse paying. In short, relative to the kinds of local working options people have in these countries, globalized industries are often the job of choice. Just take the case of
Nike in Vietnam, which, like all highly globalizing countries, has a faster per capita GDP and income growth rate than less globalizing countries like Indonesia or most of sub-Saharan Africa, despite an otherwise oppressive and corrupt political regime. So, concerning their basic needs, global capitalism is on balance a benefit to them: they work fewer hours and get more pay than they otherwise would.
DVD suggestion of the day: Anton Chekov's
The Cherry Orchard (2000), directed by Michael Cacoyannis and starring Charlotte Rampling (Ranyevskaya) and Alan Bates (Gayev). A visibly stunning parable on the demise of the Imperial Russian state and the inability of the Russian aristocracy to adapt to new realities until it is too late.
A lot of discussion has been bouncing back and forth about the legitimacy of the war in Iraq. That's a fait accompli, so right now what I'm more worried about is ensuring that a stable liberal-minded regime come about there. Besides the general lawlessness and the clear incompetence of the Bush administration in adequately planning a postwar occupation scenario, the big debate seems to be: democracy now and liberalism later, or democracy later and liberalism now?
It's worth while considering what happened in
Bosnia when we chose the former of these two options. There, you had even worse ethnic strife and bitterness than in Iraq, with active ethnic cleansing having just been stopped by armed western intervention. Just as in Iraq today, there were no clear native leaders willing and able to come forward to bind up that society's wounds, so the west simply appointed some. But note what that NYT article says:
"As for elections — a perennial concern of American officials — they have simply not taken place for local posts here. The people of Brcko have voted, largely along ethnic lines, in the four national elections that have been held in Bosnia since 1996. But they have not elected a single city official; instead, the supervisor appoints the city council. 'Thankfully it didn't happen,' Senad Pecanin, editor of the weekly magazine Dani, said of local elections. 'The worst mistake we made in Bosnia was insisting on early elections,' he said. 'They just confirmed the results of the war in political terms.'"
They just confirmed the results of the war in political terms. Sometimes, when you try to impose your ideals on a foreign society, you forget that people usually have to have certain basic needs satisfied first. Bosnia is a case that shows what can happen if outsiders approach the desperate problems facing failed societies pragmatically. If they don't, just look at Afghanistan: nominally, it has democracy and a liberal government. But the power of that government is such that -- as a result of total lack of resources and economic development -- it cannot reign in centripetal forces always threatening to tear it apart. Let's not get Iraq wrong like we have Afghanistan.
Here's a quote from the
Economist (12 June 2003) concerning the recent turmoil surrounding the European Constitutional Convention:
"But in one crucial respect it is already a gloomy failure. For it has failed to achieve its proclaimed objective of sparking a wide public debate.... [a] recent Spanish opinion poll found that a good 90% of Spaniards were unaware of the convention's existence and only 1% knew its goal was to write a constitution for the EU -- and by extension for Spaniards. When [Convention President] Mr Giscard d'Estaing published his first full draft, the event was not even mentioned in
Bild, Germany's biggest-circulation newspaper. The British tabloids, by contrast, have run front-page stories claiming that a "blueprint for tyranny"� is being drawn up in Brussels. Many Europeans know so little about the EU that the convention's debates would mean nothing to them. A poll taken for Britain's Foreign Office in 2001 discovered that a quarter of Britons did not know that their country was actually a member of the European Union, and 7% thought that the United States was in it [sic!]."
The question immediately arises: can any such convention claim to be legitimate when the vast majority of the people it claims to represent are unaware of its existence? What is certainly clear is that most Europeans are profoundly uninformed about it. The
Economist concludes, probably rightly: "As a result [of failing to stimulate public debate], far from narrowing that democratic deficit, the European convention may well make it wider."
A good reminder that trade barriers are a great way to screw the poor. The wealthy,
qua wealth, are not subject to the kinds of small fluctuations in the aggregate price level of goods and services that the poor are, and so when trade barriers go up, they aren't so worried. The poor are, though. If your daily wage is two dollars, as it is for half of humanity, then lowering the price of wheat or sugar cane by even 10 cents means you're five percent richer with the same income -- and it happens more or less automatically. So why not lower trade barriers?
Powerful special interests don't want it, of course.
The Sacking of the Museum a fraud?
Found
this a couple days ago, and think it worth repeating here. Given the editorial bias of
The Guardian (one of whose editorialists once began her screed by saying "Now, I'm just as Anti-American as the next person..."), this is IMO a credible report, since we would expect it to
hype the damage rather than minimize it.
"Furious, I conclude two things from all this. The first is the credulousness of many western academics and others who cannot conceive that a plausible and intelligent fellow-professional [Iraqi Museum director Donny George] might have been an apparatchiks of a fascist regime and a propagandist for his own past. The second is that - these days - you cannot say anything too bad about the Yanks and not be believed."
Another possibility, of course, is that he lied because he had no particular reason to think he'd get funding anytime soon. Or, he might just have
hated Americans (not a very uncommon thing nowadays, as we all know). Who knows? If we can believe most of the reports coming out of Baghdad now, which we might not, it seems most of his underlings are pointing the finger at him
A friend sent me
this just a while ago. You know, it would be nice if one of two things happened in re the UN: They should (a) either provide appropriate funding and the necessary leadership (ha!) to carry out military missions which don't result in the cannibalization of people's internal organs, or, (b) they should stay the hell out of affairs they are unwilling to do competently. For those of us who think the UN has a legitimate role on the world stage, it just confirms their reputation for rigid bureaucracy and incompetence and gives palaeo-conservatives in Washington the excuses they need to lower funding for the UN.
Ever have one of those days where everything seems to go right? Today has been one of those so far. Had Georgian today, and as anyone familiar with the language knows, it might as well have been created by God to confound the wise. Unlike most other sessions, I'm actually beginning to remember a lot of those really obscure roots that are all two phonemes long, things like /Xd/ and how the preverbs alter their meanings in unpredictable ways. I'm also picking up on those obscure rules governing the selection of screeves between clauses, so I feel like I'm progressing in the language. The other big thing, of course, was that I got the FLAS scholarship, which is nice. On to some Nodar Dumbaje for next week.
Oh, one book suggestion:
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in the Congo, by Adam Hochschild. Like reading about oppression, slavery and the erection of a protofascist state? This is your book. All kakologists take note.
