Monday, April 25, 2005
- DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA: THE PRIVATE AND THE PUBLIC
Lecturer: Eduard van de Bilt
This was the last one, guys! Prof. van de Bilt asked us --as he usually does-- our opinion about the course and the reading list. In accordance with my self-imposed silence policy (I talk too much), I didn't utter a word (*). I think some of the pieces --Freud and Nancy in particular-- have nothing to with democracy in America. Still, I'm glad they were on the list.
The reason is simple: I was forced to think hard about what my Left-wing oriented friends think and read. For that I am grateful. Even if Nancy's paper is IMHO a total waste of time and energy, it gave me valuable information on why people would bother to read it. (See below my comments on Nancy.)
So, once again, I leave completely satisfied. Soon --too soon-- we will go back to the real life, and we will remember with great pleasure our American Studies at UvA!
(*) Just before the start of Monday's session, I overheard a conversation between two of my Dutch colleagues, visibly unaware of my status as a Dutch language student at the "Advanced Level". So I understood everything. These colleagues complained about a number of students who were "too eager to present their case", and too enthusiastic, both on the Left and on the Right (that would be me, I guess). They do have a point. But I will say this: it is among those who expressed "passionate political views" that we find the best book presentations of the course.
Lecturer: Eduard van de Bilt
This was the last one, guys! Prof. van de Bilt asked us --as he usually does-- our opinion about the course and the reading list. In accordance with my self-imposed silence policy (I talk too much), I didn't utter a word (*). I think some of the pieces --Freud and Nancy in particular-- have nothing to with democracy in America. Still, I'm glad they were on the list.
The reason is simple: I was forced to think hard about what my Left-wing oriented friends think and read. For that I am grateful. Even if Nancy's paper is IMHO a total waste of time and energy, it gave me valuable information on why people would bother to read it. (See below my comments on Nancy.)
So, once again, I leave completely satisfied. Soon --too soon-- we will go back to the real life, and we will remember with great pleasure our American Studies at UvA!
(*) Just before the start of Monday's session, I overheard a conversation between two of my Dutch colleagues, visibly unaware of my status as a Dutch language student at the "Advanced Level". So I understood everything. These colleagues complained about a number of students who were "too eager to present their case", and too enthusiastic, both on the Left and on the Right (that would be me, I guess). They do have a point. But I will say this: it is among those who expressed "passionate political views" that we find the best book presentations of the course.
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
CORPORATE SCANDALS. Insatiable Greed at the Top?
. William Buckley Jr.: "Capitalism's Boil", NRO
William Buckley, the conservative writer and founder of National Review, blasts the three top managers at Viacom for awarding themselves between $52 and $56 million each as "compensation" for their work during 2004. The corporate scandals that began to emerge in 2000-2001 were generally attributed to "the imperial CEO", that is to say, to the lack of checks and balances at the (top) management level.
In a widely quoted speech before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs of the Senate (July 16, 2002), Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan asked himself rhetorically: "Why did corporate governance checks and balances that served us reasonably well in the past break down?" And he answered immediately:
At root was the rapid enlargement of stock market capitalizations in the latter part of the 1990s that arguably engendered an outsized increase in opportunities for avarice.
Buckley provides a wonderful illustration of John Adams's views about human nature: "unchecked passions" will always bring about corruption and bad management -- in business, in church, and in government (*). Adams also believed that passion intensifies and increases exponentially as one rises in the world, which is exactly what Greenspan is aluding to.
The words used by Buckley and Greenspan --rivalry, aggrandizement, humilitation, avarice-- were very familiar to Adams 200 years ago. Some things never change!
(*) In his notes on the Abbé de Mably's De la législation, taken in 1791, Adams wrote: "Avarice and ambition unchecked will work ruin everywhere." (See the excellent compilation by Zoltán Haraszti John Adams & The Prophets of Progress. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1952, p. 133).
. William Buckley Jr.: "Capitalism's Boil", NRO
William Buckley, the conservative writer and founder of National Review, blasts the three top managers at Viacom for awarding themselves between $52 and $56 million each as "compensation" for their work during 2004. The corporate scandals that began to emerge in 2000-2001 were generally attributed to "the imperial CEO", that is to say, to the lack of checks and balances at the (top) management level.
In a widely quoted speech before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs of the Senate (July 16, 2002), Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan asked himself rhetorically: "Why did corporate governance checks and balances that served us reasonably well in the past break down?" And he answered immediately:
At root was the rapid enlargement of stock market capitalizations in the latter part of the 1990s that arguably engendered an outsized increase in opportunities for avarice.
Buckley provides a wonderful illustration of John Adams's views about human nature: "unchecked passions" will always bring about corruption and bad management -- in business, in church, and in government (*). Adams also believed that passion intensifies and increases exponentially as one rises in the world, which is exactly what Greenspan is aluding to.
The words used by Buckley and Greenspan --rivalry, aggrandizement, humilitation, avarice-- were very familiar to Adams 200 years ago. Some things never change!
(*) In his notes on the Abbé de Mably's De la législation, taken in 1791, Adams wrote: "Avarice and ambition unchecked will work ruin everywhere." (See the excellent compilation by Zoltán Haraszti John Adams & The Prophets of Progress. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1952, p. 133).
Saturday, April 16, 2005
- THE INOPERATIVE Mr. NANCY: A Daunting Piece of Meaningless Mumbo-Jumbo. Agustin's Comments on Jean-Luc Nancy: "The Inoperative Community".
On April 11 Carla undertook with remarkable courage the task of reviewing what a I consider a worthless piece of charabia, the French word for gibberish: Mr. Nancy's "The Inoperative Community." (Privately, most of the students I talked to were in agreement with me on that one.) Consider the following sentence:
"The absolute must be the absolute of its own absolutness, or not be at all. In other words: to be absolutely alone, it is not enough that I be so; I must also be alone being alone -- and this of course is contradictory" (p. 4)
And it gets worse:
"This rupture (analogous, if not indentical, to Heidegger's distinction between the ontical and the ontological) defines a relation to the absolute, imposing on the absolute a relation to its own Being instead of making this Being immanent to the absolute totality of beings ... Ecstasy answers --if it is properly speaking an "answer" -- to the impossibilty of the absolutness of the absolute, or to the 'absolute' impossibility of complete immanence." (p. 6)
I could go on and on like this -- in fact, I must have understood only a couple of sentences in more than 40 pages of madness. What's going on here? I wish I knew (*). Carla admitted that she spent some time "looking for books that teach how to read this book." One hypothesis is that the use of charabia creates a strategically important sense of awe. The reader, bewildered by the complexity of the language, submits to the writer: "If he says such complicated things, he must be a learned man, a savant."
Once the sense of awe has been created, the author drops a bomb from time to time, in a language that --surprisingly-- becomes very plain. Thus, "our liberal societies inflict no less intolerable forms of suffering" (compared with communism). Nice try, Mr. Knows-it-all! But you know what? I just don't buy that phenomenal absurdity.
Mr. Nancy does not produce any piece of evidence to prove his point. There are no comparative statistics of income per capita; there is no mention of the freedom of the press and religion and --I almost forgot-- no mention of a slight detail: the number of innocents massacred in Gulags, cultural revolutions, killing fields, deportations, etc.
But readers are so impressed with Mr. Nancy's empty talk about "immanence", "operative immortality", "being-ecstasic of Being", etc, that they proceed to uncritically "buy" his nonsene wholesale. Carla herself appeared to succumb to the Frenchman's literary charme, when she said that "the US are now implementing oppression in Irak."
Yes, yes, that's what she said. The first free elections ever to take place in an Arab country? Women voting? That's oppression, man, don't you see? Once again, the butcher of Baghdad --a sunni dictator who really oppressed the shiite majority, and who used chemical weapons against his own people-- is not even mentioned. New evidence shows that "at least 290 grave sites containing the remains of some 300,000 people have been found since the American invasion two years ago" (**). But it's the American oppressors, stupid!
The bottom line, in my opinion, is that Mr. Nancy's paper is a fraud, a hoax, a chimère. That's not unusual: a group of MIT students has just written a piece of computer-generated gibberish that was accepted for presentation at the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.
The paper bears the very nancyesque title "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy." Charabia!
(*) For more info on gibberish and the "post-modern" school, see Alan Sokal: "Why I wrote my parody", and John Miller & Mark Molesky: "Jacques Derrida, R.I.P. The legacy of deconstruction", NRO, October 13, 2004.
(**) Robert F. Worth: "Iraqis Find Graves Thought to Hold Hussein's Victims", New York Times, April 15, 2005.
On April 11 Carla undertook with remarkable courage the task of reviewing what a I consider a worthless piece of charabia, the French word for gibberish: Mr. Nancy's "The Inoperative Community." (Privately, most of the students I talked to were in agreement with me on that one.) Consider the following sentence:
"The absolute must be the absolute of its own absolutness, or not be at all. In other words: to be absolutely alone, it is not enough that I be so; I must also be alone being alone -- and this of course is contradictory" (p. 4)
And it gets worse:
"This rupture (analogous, if not indentical, to Heidegger's distinction between the ontical and the ontological) defines a relation to the absolute, imposing on the absolute a relation to its own Being instead of making this Being immanent to the absolute totality of beings ... Ecstasy answers --if it is properly speaking an "answer" -- to the impossibilty of the absolutness of the absolute, or to the 'absolute' impossibility of complete immanence." (p. 6)
I could go on and on like this -- in fact, I must have understood only a couple of sentences in more than 40 pages of madness. What's going on here? I wish I knew (*). Carla admitted that she spent some time "looking for books that teach how to read this book." One hypothesis is that the use of charabia creates a strategically important sense of awe. The reader, bewildered by the complexity of the language, submits to the writer: "If he says such complicated things, he must be a learned man, a savant."
Once the sense of awe has been created, the author drops a bomb from time to time, in a language that --surprisingly-- becomes very plain. Thus, "our liberal societies inflict no less intolerable forms of suffering" (compared with communism). Nice try, Mr. Knows-it-all! But you know what? I just don't buy that phenomenal absurdity.
Mr. Nancy does not produce any piece of evidence to prove his point. There are no comparative statistics of income per capita; there is no mention of the freedom of the press and religion and --I almost forgot-- no mention of a slight detail: the number of innocents massacred in Gulags, cultural revolutions, killing fields, deportations, etc.
But readers are so impressed with Mr. Nancy's empty talk about "immanence", "operative immortality", "being-ecstasic of Being", etc, that they proceed to uncritically "buy" his nonsene wholesale. Carla herself appeared to succumb to the Frenchman's literary charme, when she said that "the US are now implementing oppression in Irak."
Yes, yes, that's what she said. The first free elections ever to take place in an Arab country? Women voting? That's oppression, man, don't you see? Once again, the butcher of Baghdad --a sunni dictator who really oppressed the shiite majority, and who used chemical weapons against his own people-- is not even mentioned. New evidence shows that "at least 290 grave sites containing the remains of some 300,000 people have been found since the American invasion two years ago" (**). But it's the American oppressors, stupid!
The bottom line, in my opinion, is that Mr. Nancy's paper is a fraud, a hoax, a chimère. That's not unusual: a group of MIT students has just written a piece of computer-generated gibberish that was accepted for presentation at the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.
The paper bears the very nancyesque title "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy." Charabia!
(*) For more info on gibberish and the "post-modern" school, see Alan Sokal: "Why I wrote my parody", and John Miller & Mark Molesky: "Jacques Derrida, R.I.P. The legacy of deconstruction", NRO, October 13, 2004.
(**) Robert F. Worth: "Iraqis Find Graves Thought to Hold Hussein's Victims", New York Times, April 15, 2005.
# posted by Agustin @ 6:55 PM 
Friday, April 15, 2005
JOHN ADAMS. A Magnificent Website!
. The Massachusetts Historical Society: Adams Family Papers, An Electronic Archive.
This is truly a fantastic webiste. You will find the correspondence between John and Abigail Adams, John Adams's journal and John Adams' autobiography. There's an excellent search engine. Wonderful news for researchers!
. The Massachusetts Historical Society: Adams Family Papers, An Electronic Archive.
This is truly a fantastic webiste. You will find the correspondence between John and Abigail Adams, John Adams's journal and John Adams' autobiography. There's an excellent search engine. Wonderful news for researchers!
PUBLIC OPINION. Information Markets Betting on the New Pope!
. John Tierney: "The Smart Money", New York Times.
When Jennifer and I reviewed Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (February 28), we mentioned the "libertarian critique" and the role of information markets in gauging public opinion (by the way, I posted the contents of our presentation here, but then I erased it by mistake! I'll post it again soon.)
Now they're betting on the new pope.
. John Tierney: "The Smart Money", New York Times.
When Jennifer and I reviewed Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (February 28), we mentioned the "libertarian critique" and the role of information markets in gauging public opinion (by the way, I posted the contents of our presentation here, but then I erased it by mistake! I'll post it again soon.)
Now they're betting on the new pope.
Monday, April 11, 2005
- William & João Respond.
[William, João, & Gejo: "Rough Comparison Between Post-Lenin USSR and Post-Lewinsky USA: Soviet Union & United States of America", April 4; Agustin: "The Trouble with American Studies", April 7]
. Agustin. On March 21, following the presentation of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, our self-styled "anarcho-syndicalist" and "communist" colleagues made a number of comments that struck me as disgraceful. Children? They are "fuck--g children". Marriage? It's like "rape, and a concentration camp." And get this: American women were "thrown out" of factories when soldiers came back from the war in 1945!
. William & João. Well, as anyone who has read about post-WW2 history will know, "At the end of World War Two, those women who had found alternate employment from the normal for women, lost their jobs." (1)
. A. Then, on April 4, the panel presenting Jürgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere handed out a comparison between Neoconservatives and ... Stalinism. That these guys know as much about history as I know about nuclear fusion is beside the point. After all, they can read Anne Appelbaum's Gulag: A History (New York: Random House, 2003), where the number of victims is estimated at well over 18 million (between 1929 and 1953.)
. W & J. Actually, we have read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's, The Gulag Archipelago, the book that brought the notion of gulag to the Western World. It may be interesting to point out that Solzhenitsyn was a major supporter of fascism both in Spain and Portugal, bemoaning the liberation of Portugal's colonies in 1974.
. A. Is it about the sour taste of (electoral) defeat? In a sense, yes. My liberal friends are very fond of democracy -- only when they win. When they lose, America is not such a democratic nation after all.
. W & J. True, your "liberal" friends ARE very fond of democracy. Defining democracy as "everyone being able to vote and to having their vote count", as opposed to both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections, in which people where prevented from voting and voting results were manipulated by companies that provided the voting machines (not to mention that the head of a company [Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc.] vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."] (2) If the Diebold election episode isn't enough to convince you, perhaps you would like to know that "it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states [Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error." The odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by chance are, according to [Dr. Steven F.] Freeman, "250,000,000 to one." That's 250 MILLION to ONE. (3)
. A. Interesting. But the problem, I'm afraid, runs deeper than that. I am beginning to suspect that the so-called "post-modern" culture is making destructive inroads into the minds of some of my younger colleagues.
. W & J. Possibly true. The culture that is provided by media outlets nowadays truly does tend to promote ignorance. Worth noting is the fact that this culture is provided by 5 major corporations that are owned by major contributors to the Republican Party. The "filth" in entertainment that people over at Fox News complain about all the time is spewed out constantly by Fox TV. Interesting.
. A. If every opinion is a "construction" that can be "deconstructed", then there is little room for moral absolutes.
. W & J. We would define our philosophical edifice as being the result of reason. Reason breeds principles. But if you want to frame this according to "moral absolutes", then we'll say that we uphold an absolute respect for "justice" and "life", which means that everyone is entitled to the pursuit of happiness within the framework of (international) law. For us, everything is based on principle, not on number or convenience. The relativism lies with the people that want the rule of law when it prevents gay marriage but will brush legislation aside when detaining and interrogating random human beings (In another transcript [from the trials of the Guantanamo detainees], the unidentified president of a U.S. military tribunal bursts out: "I don't care about international law. I don't want to hear the words 'international law' again. We are not concerned with international law." (4) The relativism lies with people who define as "less tragic" the death of some thousand innocent people from Iraq and Afghanistan as compared to millions in Russia. Our "moral absolute" defines both situations as equally tragic.
. A. Everything is relative. Anything compares with anything. Neo-conservatives, a group of brilliant, hard-working, honest intellectuals are thus compared to history's bloodiest mass-murderer. The death of one terrorist who plots to massacre thousands of civilians equals the destruction of eigtheen million innocent citizens. Et voilà!
. W & J. Neocons can be either brilliant or honest. They can't be both. If they are honest, then Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice truly did believe the WMDs justification, the "ties to Al-Qaeda" rationale and the proposition that it would take less troops and less money to occupy Iraq than to liberate it. That means they're not brilliant, they're incompetent at best, retarded at worst. If they truly are brilliant, then all of this is an intricate manipulative plot to justify a war with a profit motivation. Does this strike you as honest? Taking into account the track record of these people during the Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, as well as their ties to oil and energy industries, we're more inclined to believe the "brilliant" hypothesis. Intellectuals? Probably not. Engineers of destruction? Sounds about right.
. A. The fact that neo-conservatives were instrumental in promoting democracy in Afghanistan and Irak --with revolutionary ripple effects around the world, from Lebanon to Kyrgyzstan-- leaves my liberal colleagues completely indifferent.
. W & J. Supporting democracy would mean not supporting dictatorial rule to start with. The George W. Bush administration's support for the Taliban up until 9/11 and the arms sales to Iraq by both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations (that allowed the gassing of Kurds during Saddam's al-Anfal Campaign from 1986 to 1989) demolish the argument that neocons have tried to promote democracy anywhere. If you add the cases of Nicaragua's Contras, the Santa Cruz massacre in East Timor in 1991 under Suharto's occupation and the convenient overlook of totalitarian and brutal regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan or Chile (to name a few), it's pretty obvious that democracy is not even a faint concern for these people. There is a whiff of ethno-centrism here, not to mention the "ripple effects" logical Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle ("Oaks are trees. Pines as trees. Therefore, pines are oaks." – "We invaded Iraq, a country in the middle East. Lebanon, a country in the Middle East, is in turmoil. Therefore, Lebanon is in turmoil because we invaded Iraq.")
. A. There is a whiff of ethno-centrism here, as if democracy in regions far from our civilized world should not be a concern to us.
. W & J. Coming from someone who dubs people from non-westernized civilizations "savages who don't even have toilet paper" (in class discussion, March 21st), that's a really valid insult.
. A. But let's tell it like it is: anti-democracy liberals are reactionaries; neo-cons are revolutionaries.
. W & J. After all we have said, your point has by now been rendered moot.
. A. To sum up: the "fuck--g children" episode and the comparison "Stalin-Neocons" do worry me, because I have developed a sincere affection for UvA's American Studies Program. The risk is that the program becomes irrelevant. If the competition reads Huntington instead of Freud, my guess is that students will choose the competition.
. W & J. To sum up: the "fucking chil--en" episode doesn't really worry us, because we truly do believe in free speech. The comparison "Stalin-Neocons", that started off as an attempt to create a passionate discussion, has actually grown into a frighteningly valid point: "lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering [of Conservative leaders meeting in Washington] that [Supreme Court Justice] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, 'upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.' Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said. The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." (5)
(1) See "Women and World War Two"
(2) Julie Carr Smyth: "Voting Machine Controversy", Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 28, 2003.
(3) "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy", BuzzFlash.com, November 11, 2004.
(4) Pete Yost & Matt Kelley: "Records Give Voice to Guantanamo Detainees", Associated Press, April 9, 2005.
(5) Danda Milbank: "And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty", Washington Post, April 9, 2005.
[William, João, & Gejo: "Rough Comparison Between Post-Lenin USSR and Post-Lewinsky USA: Soviet Union & United States of America", April 4; Agustin: "The Trouble with American Studies", April 7]
. Agustin. On March 21, following the presentation of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, our self-styled "anarcho-syndicalist" and "communist" colleagues made a number of comments that struck me as disgraceful. Children? They are "fuck--g children". Marriage? It's like "rape, and a concentration camp." And get this: American women were "thrown out" of factories when soldiers came back from the war in 1945!
. William & João. Well, as anyone who has read about post-WW2 history will know, "At the end of World War Two, those women who had found alternate employment from the normal for women, lost their jobs." (1)
. A. Then, on April 4, the panel presenting Jürgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere handed out a comparison between Neoconservatives and ... Stalinism. That these guys know as much about history as I know about nuclear fusion is beside the point. After all, they can read Anne Appelbaum's Gulag: A History (New York: Random House, 2003), where the number of victims is estimated at well over 18 million (between 1929 and 1953.)
. W & J. Actually, we have read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's, The Gulag Archipelago, the book that brought the notion of gulag to the Western World. It may be interesting to point out that Solzhenitsyn was a major supporter of fascism both in Spain and Portugal, bemoaning the liberation of Portugal's colonies in 1974.
. A. Is it about the sour taste of (electoral) defeat? In a sense, yes. My liberal friends are very fond of democracy -- only when they win. When they lose, America is not such a democratic nation after all.
. W & J. True, your "liberal" friends ARE very fond of democracy. Defining democracy as "everyone being able to vote and to having their vote count", as opposed to both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections, in which people where prevented from voting and voting results were manipulated by companies that provided the voting machines (not to mention that the head of a company [Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc.] vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."] (2) If the Diebold election episode isn't enough to convince you, perhaps you would like to know that "it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states [Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error." The odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by chance are, according to [Dr. Steven F.] Freeman, "250,000,000 to one." That's 250 MILLION to ONE. (3)
. A. Interesting. But the problem, I'm afraid, runs deeper than that. I am beginning to suspect that the so-called "post-modern" culture is making destructive inroads into the minds of some of my younger colleagues.
. W & J. Possibly true. The culture that is provided by media outlets nowadays truly does tend to promote ignorance. Worth noting is the fact that this culture is provided by 5 major corporations that are owned by major contributors to the Republican Party. The "filth" in entertainment that people over at Fox News complain about all the time is spewed out constantly by Fox TV. Interesting.
. A. If every opinion is a "construction" that can be "deconstructed", then there is little room for moral absolutes.
. W & J. We would define our philosophical edifice as being the result of reason. Reason breeds principles. But if you want to frame this according to "moral absolutes", then we'll say that we uphold an absolute respect for "justice" and "life", which means that everyone is entitled to the pursuit of happiness within the framework of (international) law. For us, everything is based on principle, not on number or convenience. The relativism lies with the people that want the rule of law when it prevents gay marriage but will brush legislation aside when detaining and interrogating random human beings (In another transcript [from the trials of the Guantanamo detainees], the unidentified president of a U.S. military tribunal bursts out: "I don't care about international law. I don't want to hear the words 'international law' again. We are not concerned with international law." (4) The relativism lies with people who define as "less tragic" the death of some thousand innocent people from Iraq and Afghanistan as compared to millions in Russia. Our "moral absolute" defines both situations as equally tragic.
. A. Everything is relative. Anything compares with anything. Neo-conservatives, a group of brilliant, hard-working, honest intellectuals are thus compared to history's bloodiest mass-murderer. The death of one terrorist who plots to massacre thousands of civilians equals the destruction of eigtheen million innocent citizens. Et voilà!
. W & J. Neocons can be either brilliant or honest. They can't be both. If they are honest, then Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice truly did believe the WMDs justification, the "ties to Al-Qaeda" rationale and the proposition that it would take less troops and less money to occupy Iraq than to liberate it. That means they're not brilliant, they're incompetent at best, retarded at worst. If they truly are brilliant, then all of this is an intricate manipulative plot to justify a war with a profit motivation. Does this strike you as honest? Taking into account the track record of these people during the Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, as well as their ties to oil and energy industries, we're more inclined to believe the "brilliant" hypothesis. Intellectuals? Probably not. Engineers of destruction? Sounds about right.
. A. The fact that neo-conservatives were instrumental in promoting democracy in Afghanistan and Irak --with revolutionary ripple effects around the world, from Lebanon to Kyrgyzstan-- leaves my liberal colleagues completely indifferent.
. W & J. Supporting democracy would mean not supporting dictatorial rule to start with. The George W. Bush administration's support for the Taliban up until 9/11 and the arms sales to Iraq by both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations (that allowed the gassing of Kurds during Saddam's al-Anfal Campaign from 1986 to 1989) demolish the argument that neocons have tried to promote democracy anywhere. If you add the cases of Nicaragua's Contras, the Santa Cruz massacre in East Timor in 1991 under Suharto's occupation and the convenient overlook of totalitarian and brutal regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan or Chile (to name a few), it's pretty obvious that democracy is not even a faint concern for these people. There is a whiff of ethno-centrism here, not to mention the "ripple effects" logical Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle ("Oaks are trees. Pines as trees. Therefore, pines are oaks." – "We invaded Iraq, a country in the middle East. Lebanon, a country in the Middle East, is in turmoil. Therefore, Lebanon is in turmoil because we invaded Iraq.")
. A. There is a whiff of ethno-centrism here, as if democracy in regions far from our civilized world should not be a concern to us.
. W & J. Coming from someone who dubs people from non-westernized civilizations "savages who don't even have toilet paper" (in class discussion, March 21st), that's a really valid insult.
. A. But let's tell it like it is: anti-democracy liberals are reactionaries; neo-cons are revolutionaries.
. W & J. After all we have said, your point has by now been rendered moot.
. A. To sum up: the "fuck--g children" episode and the comparison "Stalin-Neocons" do worry me, because I have developed a sincere affection for UvA's American Studies Program. The risk is that the program becomes irrelevant. If the competition reads Huntington instead of Freud, my guess is that students will choose the competition.
. W & J. To sum up: the "fucking chil--en" episode doesn't really worry us, because we truly do believe in free speech. The comparison "Stalin-Neocons", that started off as an attempt to create a passionate discussion, has actually grown into a frighteningly valid point: "lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering [of Conservative leaders meeting in Washington] that [Supreme Court Justice] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, 'upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.' Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said. The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." (5)
(1) See "Women and World War Two"
(2) Julie Carr Smyth: "Voting Machine Controversy", Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 28, 2003.
(3) "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy", BuzzFlash.com, November 11, 2004.
(4) Pete Yost & Matt Kelley: "Records Give Voice to Guantanamo Detainees", Associated Press, April 9, 2005.
(5) Danda Milbank: "And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty", Washington Post, April 9, 2005.
Thursday, April 07, 2005
- The Trouble With American Studies -- Reflections on the last two Presentations. By Agustin.
On March 21, following the presentation of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, our self-styled "anarcho-syndicalist" and "communist" colleagues made a number of comments that struck me as disgraceful. Children? They are "fuck--g children". Marriage? It's like "rape, and a concentration camp." And get this: American women were "thrown out" of factories when soldiers came back from the war in 1945!
Then, on April 4, the panel presenting Jürgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere handed out a comparison between Neoconservatives and ... Stalinism. That these guys know as much about history as I know about nuclear fusion is beside the point. After all, they can read Anne Appelbaum's Gulag: A History (New York: Random House, 2003), where the number of victims is estimated at well over 18 million (between 1929 and 1953.)
Is it about the sour taste of (electoral) defeat? In a sense, yes. My liberal friends are very fond of democracy -- only when they win. When they lose, America is not such a democratic nation after all. Interesting. But the problem, I'm afraid, runs deeper than that. I am beginning to suspect that the so-called "post-modern" culture is making destructive inroads into the minds of some of my younger colleagues.
If every opinion is a "construction" that can be "deconstructed", then there is little room for moral absolutes. Everything is relative. Anything compares with anything. Neo-conservatives, a group of brilliant, hard-working, honest intellectuals (**) are thus compared to history's bloodiest mass-murderer. The death of one terrorist who plots to massacre thousands of civilians equals the destruction of eigtheen million innocent citizens. Et voilà!
The fact that neo-conservatives were instrumental in promoting democracy in Afghanistan and Irak --with revolutionary ripple effects around the world, from Lebanon to Kyrgyzstan-- leaves my liberal colleagues completely indifferent. There is a whiff of ethno-centrism here, as if democracy in regions far from our civilized world should not be a concern to us. But let's tell it like it is: anti-democracy liberals are reactionaries; neo-cons are revolutionaries.
To sum up: the "fuck--g children" episode and the comparison "Stalin-Neocons" do worry me, because I have developed a sincere affection for UvA's American Studies Program. The risk is that the program becomes irrelevant. If the competition reads Huntington instead of Freud, my guess is that students will choose the competition.
(*) You can read the introduction here. Warning: this is not for the faint-hearted.
(**) The epithet "honest" does not apply, I am afraid, to Bill Clinton's friend Sandy Burglar.
On March 21, following the presentation of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, our self-styled "anarcho-syndicalist" and "communist" colleagues made a number of comments that struck me as disgraceful. Children? They are "fuck--g children". Marriage? It's like "rape, and a concentration camp." And get this: American women were "thrown out" of factories when soldiers came back from the war in 1945!
Then, on April 4, the panel presenting Jürgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere handed out a comparison between Neoconservatives and ... Stalinism. That these guys know as much about history as I know about nuclear fusion is beside the point. After all, they can read Anne Appelbaum's Gulag: A History (New York: Random House, 2003), where the number of victims is estimated at well over 18 million (between 1929 and 1953.)
Is it about the sour taste of (electoral) defeat? In a sense, yes. My liberal friends are very fond of democracy -- only when they win. When they lose, America is not such a democratic nation after all. Interesting. But the problem, I'm afraid, runs deeper than that. I am beginning to suspect that the so-called "post-modern" culture is making destructive inroads into the minds of some of my younger colleagues.
If every opinion is a "construction" that can be "deconstructed", then there is little room for moral absolutes. Everything is relative. Anything compares with anything. Neo-conservatives, a group of brilliant, hard-working, honest intellectuals (**) are thus compared to history's bloodiest mass-murderer. The death of one terrorist who plots to massacre thousands of civilians equals the destruction of eigtheen million innocent citizens. Et voilà!
The fact that neo-conservatives were instrumental in promoting democracy in Afghanistan and Irak --with revolutionary ripple effects around the world, from Lebanon to Kyrgyzstan-- leaves my liberal colleagues completely indifferent. There is a whiff of ethno-centrism here, as if democracy in regions far from our civilized world should not be a concern to us. But let's tell it like it is: anti-democracy liberals are reactionaries; neo-cons are revolutionaries.
To sum up: the "fuck--g children" episode and the comparison "Stalin-Neocons" do worry me, because I have developed a sincere affection for UvA's American Studies Program. The risk is that the program becomes irrelevant. If the competition reads Huntington instead of Freud, my guess is that students will choose the competition.
(*) You can read the introduction here. Warning: this is not for the faint-hearted.
(**) The epithet "honest" does not apply, I am afraid, to Bill Clinton's friend Sandy Burglar.
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
THE NETHERLANDS. The End of Multiculturalism? (Again).
- The Economist: Living with Islam. The new Dutch model?
Interesting article from The Economist. Me? I'm no fan of "multiculturalism".
- The Economist: Living with Islam. The new Dutch model?
Interesting article from The Economist. Me? I'm no fan of "multiculturalism".
Monday, April 04, 2005
- The John Adams Year UvA lecture series. FIRST LECTURE SERIES: John Adams and the Early Republic.
Eduard van de Bilt, Universiteit van Amsterdam. John Adams' Political Thought: Towards a "government of laws not of men".
In the seventh lecture of the John Adams Year 2005 Celebration Series, Mr. van de Bilt discussed John Adams' political thought within the framework of his most important remark, which comes up in several places: Americans have a "government of laws, and not of men."
What follows are some of the notes I took during the presentation.
. Contemporaries were not too kind about John Adams. Historians, more or less, have adopted the same, and largely negative, view.
. John Adams' career is usually seen as consisting of two parts: a revolutionary period, and a more conservative period, the latter resulting from his 10-year long stay in aristocratical Europe. Because of its "conservative" turn, his political thought became less relevant -- and people started to pay more attention to his excentricities.
. A quote from Bernard Bailyn's Faces of the Revolution (I will post it next week.)
. Major Works. Prof. van de Bilt briefly presented Adams' major works: "A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law" (1765), "Thoughts on Government" (1776), A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787), and the Discourses on Davila (1791). Prof. van de Bilt strongly suggested to read Adams's diary and his letters to Thomas Jefferson.
. The Defense and the Discourses. The Defense, arguably Adams's most important work, resulted from his discussions with Dutch Patriots and from his readings in French pre-revolutionary pamphets and books. Dutch Patriots in particular urged him to write his thoughts on how to write constitutions in a free republic. The Discourses contain rather bleak remarks about human being -- a trace of his Calvinistic upbringing.
. Constitutional issues. In order to thrive, a republic needs an impersonal, a written document to safeguard the liberties of the people. John Adams helped to institutionalize the tradition of the division of powers, and that was one of his major contributions to political thought. The idea itself was not not new; what was new was its institutionalization through a written constitution. It came to Adams from his extensive readings in history.
. The Private & the Political. The other building bloc of Adams' political ideas came not from history but from ... psychology. Mixed ideas about himself were somehow turned into a political system that contained all the forces inside his own psyche. If either the mind or the government is dominated by a single force, problems will surface. In politics, that means a strong executive power, always ready to act as a counterweight against an all-powerful legislature.
. A Freudian avant la lettre? Passions are useful, but they have to be checked by other forces. By the same token, aristocrats are needed -- but they too can be dangerous. (By élites, Adams meant something like a "meritocracy", that is to say, he did not favor European-sytle élites.)
Eduard van de Bilt, Universiteit van Amsterdam. John Adams' Political Thought: Towards a "government of laws not of men".
In the seventh lecture of the John Adams Year 2005 Celebration Series, Mr. van de Bilt discussed John Adams' political thought within the framework of his most important remark, which comes up in several places: Americans have a "government of laws, and not of men."
What follows are some of the notes I took during the presentation.
. Contemporaries were not too kind about John Adams. Historians, more or less, have adopted the same, and largely negative, view.
. John Adams' career is usually seen as consisting of two parts: a revolutionary period, and a more conservative period, the latter resulting from his 10-year long stay in aristocratical Europe. Because of its "conservative" turn, his political thought became less relevant -- and people started to pay more attention to his excentricities.
. A quote from Bernard Bailyn's Faces of the Revolution (I will post it next week.)
. Major Works. Prof. van de Bilt briefly presented Adams' major works: "A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law" (1765), "Thoughts on Government" (1776), A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787), and the Discourses on Davila (1791). Prof. van de Bilt strongly suggested to read Adams's diary and his letters to Thomas Jefferson.
. The Defense and the Discourses. The Defense, arguably Adams's most important work, resulted from his discussions with Dutch Patriots and from his readings in French pre-revolutionary pamphets and books. Dutch Patriots in particular urged him to write his thoughts on how to write constitutions in a free republic. The Discourses contain rather bleak remarks about human being -- a trace of his Calvinistic upbringing.
. Constitutional issues. In order to thrive, a republic needs an impersonal, a written document to safeguard the liberties of the people. John Adams helped to institutionalize the tradition of the division of powers, and that was one of his major contributions to political thought. The idea itself was not not new; what was new was its institutionalization through a written constitution. It came to Adams from his extensive readings in history.
. The Private & the Political. The other building bloc of Adams' political ideas came not from history but from ... psychology. Mixed ideas about himself were somehow turned into a political system that contained all the forces inside his own psyche. If either the mind or the government is dominated by a single force, problems will surface. In politics, that means a strong executive power, always ready to act as a counterweight against an all-powerful legislature.
. A Freudian avant la lettre? Passions are useful, but they have to be checked by other forces. By the same token, aristocrats are needed -- but they too can be dangerous. (By élites, Adams meant something like a "meritocracy", that is to say, he did not favor European-sytle élites.)
- DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA: THE PRIVATE AND THE PUBLIC
Lecturer: Eduard van de Bilt
Rough Comparison Between Post-Lenin USSR and Post-Lewinsky USA: Soviet Union & United States of America
By William, João, & Gejo
. Stalinism & Elections. From 1917 to 1990, people voted in elections but it was actually a pro forma. In reality, a leader was appointed by the members of a Supreme Soviet, members that followed the policy lines of the Politburo bureaucrats that had placed them there.
. Neoconservatives & Elections. In 2000, people voted in elections but it was actually a pro forma. In reality, a leader was appointed by the members of a Supreme Court, members that followed the policy lines of the Administration bureaucrats that had placed them there.
. Stalinism & the Geneva Conventions. From 1934 to 1987, those that were considered "counterrevolutionaries" were, without regard for the Geneva Conventions, placed in concentration camps in remote locations (Siberia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia) where they were tortured, abused and killed.
. Neoconservatives & the Geneva Conventions. From 2001 onwards, those that are considered "unlawful combatants" have been, without regard for the Geneva Conventions, placed in concentration camps in remote locations (Guantanamo, Iraq, Egypt) where they are tortured, abused and killed.
. Stalinism & Foreign Policy. The Brezhnev Doctrine defines that a country harboring forces that threaten socialist interests is a justified target for a preemptive attack because “it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries." The invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan were justified according to this doctrine. The underlying rationale is dialectics that command: "Each man must choose between joining our side or the other side." (V.I. Lenin)
. Neoconservatives & Foreign Policy. The Bush Doctrine defines that a country harboring forces that threaten American interests is a justified target for a preemptive attack because "any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime [and] we will […] exercise our right of selfdefense by acting preemptively against such terrorists." The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were justified according to this doctrine. The underlying rationale is dialectics that command: "You're either with us or against us." (G.W. Bush)
Lecturer: Eduard van de Bilt
Rough Comparison Between Post-Lenin USSR and Post-Lewinsky USA: Soviet Union & United States of America
By William, João, & Gejo
. Stalinism & Elections. From 1917 to 1990, people voted in elections but it was actually a pro forma. In reality, a leader was appointed by the members of a Supreme Soviet, members that followed the policy lines of the Politburo bureaucrats that had placed them there.
. Neoconservatives & Elections. In 2000, people voted in elections but it was actually a pro forma. In reality, a leader was appointed by the members of a Supreme Court, members that followed the policy lines of the Administration bureaucrats that had placed them there.
. Stalinism & the Geneva Conventions. From 1934 to 1987, those that were considered "counterrevolutionaries" were, without regard for the Geneva Conventions, placed in concentration camps in remote locations (Siberia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia) where they were tortured, abused and killed.
. Neoconservatives & the Geneva Conventions. From 2001 onwards, those that are considered "unlawful combatants" have been, without regard for the Geneva Conventions, placed in concentration camps in remote locations (Guantanamo, Iraq, Egypt) where they are tortured, abused and killed.
. Stalinism & Foreign Policy. The Brezhnev Doctrine defines that a country harboring forces that threaten socialist interests is a justified target for a preemptive attack because “it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries." The invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan were justified according to this doctrine. The underlying rationale is dialectics that command: "Each man must choose between joining our side or the other side." (V.I. Lenin)
. Neoconservatives & Foreign Policy. The Bush Doctrine defines that a country harboring forces that threaten American interests is a justified target for a preemptive attack because "any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime [and] we will […] exercise our right of selfdefense by acting preemptively against such terrorists." The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were justified according to this doctrine. The underlying rationale is dialectics that command: "You're either with us or against us." (G.W. Bush)
