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Index: Politics & Culture

The selective outrage of American media.

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.

Race, exploitation, and the press 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.

Affluence, comfort, and ‘the silken web of managerialism’.

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.

Havel on Russia: ‘There can be no talk of democracy…’

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 […]

The Historical Case for the Iowa Caucuses.

Jon Lauck: Iowa’s agrarian heritage and orderly farms and its generally rooted character also help explain Iowa’s political culture.

On ancestor worship and other peculiar beliefs.

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.

• Arendt’s courage: anxieties that ‘did not go over into fear’.

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.

• Scots, aspiring to be Basques.

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.

Truthtelling.

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.

• Christopher Lasch: are student protests the same as serious social action?

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.

• Germany finally assumes control of Europe – and ownership of the Balkans.

The European Union, its attendant bureaucracy, even the euro, all appear to stem from the Berlin-Vichy collaboration.

• Fire this time: How the Arab Spring plays in London.

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.

• Britain’s latest blitz.

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.

• From Wall Street to Harvard, a lack of judgment, an excess of fear.

Those who employed fancy lawyers to evade taxes are offered amnesty instead of judgment if they return their money to the United States. We frequent restaurants knowing that affordable food is subsidized by underpaid illegal help in the kitchen and we pay nannies and construction workers in cash, rationalizing our violation of both the law and our moral beliefs that everyone deserves health care and other benefits. In academia, professors have so fully abandoned their duty to judge that more than 50 percent of the grades at Harvard University are in the A range. And no Wall Street firm that has received a bailout has fired its CEO.

• Authority, morality, and mayhem in Liverpool and London.

Gaus argues that social rules and the authority to enforce them emerge out of everyday social interactions and are supported by healthy emotional and dispositional states. We treat each other as free and equal moral persons when we recognize only those social rules which each individual has reason to accept and internalize.