Sarkozy seemed to represent a refreshing future for French politics after years dominated by cynical men like Mitterand and Chirac. And he seemed like a man of the moment: Throughout the world there is a growing disgust with the political class — the same gallery of men and women with the same trite ideas and sentimental platitudes, all propped up by media companies that have lost their ability to inform, let alone influence.
Harry Stein: All thoughtful people want to resolve America’s great historical ailment, racism. But one of the things we’ll have to do if that monumental
enterprise is to have any chance of success is to address honestly the
desperate condition of the urban underclass – not only because it is
the right and moral thing to do, but because as Daniel Patrick
Moynihan so presciently observed, the pathologies that emerge there
eventually take root throughout the rest of society.
While civil rights leaders have raised their voices to speak out against this [Trayvon Martin] tragedy, few if any will do the same about the larger tragedy of daily carnage that is black-on-black crime in America.
Harry Stein: Quite simply, whether in ignorance, ideological blindness or simple fear, the media, ever fixated on the racism canard, has doggedly refused to face the harder truths of race in America. Indeed, an excellent case can be made that it is in the racial arena, more than in any other, that its distorted worldview has done the most grievous harm.
Walter Weisskopf: Max Weber talked about the iron cage of industrialism in which the individual is imprisoned. What we are oppressed by today is the silken web of managerialism that does not oppress directly but bribes us into submission by incredible affluence and comforts.
by TOM JONES [Czech Position/Česká pozice] – The morning after Czech President Václav Klaus declined to comment on the post-election situation in Russia during his Russian counterpart’s visit to Prague, an appeal to Russian citizens and the country’s opposition movements by Václav Havel, the first post-communist Czech president, was published in the independent Russian newspaper [...]
Jon Lauck: Iowa’s agrarian heritage and orderly farms and its generally rooted character also help explain Iowa’s political culture.
Saturday, 5 November 2011
Herbert Spencer: The rudimentary form of all religion is the propitiation of dead ancestors, who are supposed to be still existing, and to be capable of working good or evil to their descendants.
The first thing that I would like to say about Hannah Arendt is that she was not afraid; that her anxieties simply did not go over into fear.
Aware that he may not be able to win a majority for the full break-up of the Union, Scotland’s First Minister is hedging his bets.
Roger Berkowitz: The problem we confront is defactualization. And the danger is that facts are being reduced to opinions. The danger is also that opinions masquerade as facts. In other words, as fact and opinion blur together, the very idea of factual truth falls away. It is increasingly possible that the belief in and aspiration for factual truth is being expunged from political argument.
He returned to the theme evoked in his acerbic remarks on Mailer: the student movement had to replace acting out with serious social action. To endure, a popular movement would have to draw upon cultural sources deeper than a political agenda (as the African-American protest had done in the South). Above all, new forms for the practice of democracy in everyday life would have to be created by reviving legacies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, erased by the homogenization of mass culture and the corporate colonization of daily life.
Thursday, 29 September 2011
The European Union, its attendant bureaucracy, even the euro, all appear to stem from the Berlin-Vichy collaboration.
Anthony O’Hear: A few weeks ago, the Arab Spring notwithstanding, we had no inkling of what would happen in London and other English cities as soon as August 2011. We had no sense of what power to the people – welcomed by some of us in Cairo and Benghazi – might come mean in the world’s oldest democracy, now, so to speak, and in England, facilitated as it was here just as in North Africa by social media.
I realized that the collapse of British society into a Hobbesian nightmare of mutual predation and despair was still some distance off when I caught two little straws in the wind. The first was a well-framed photograph of a badly scorched bit of London, taken on the morning after a night of riots and vandalism.
Alan Wall: The Janus Face of Metaphor. | Clues and Labyrinths. | Ruin, the collector and sad mortality.
