Magical thinking

"Didion has always juxtaposed the hardware and the soft: hummingbirds and the FBI; nightmares of infant death and the dawn light for a Pacific bomb test; disposable needles in a Snoopy wastebasket and the cost of a visa to leave Phnom Penh; four year olds in burning cars, rattlesnakes in playpens, earthquakes, tidle waves and Patty Hearst.

The daughter of conservative Republicans who...voted 'ardently' for Barry Goldwater in 1964 [describes] the abduction of American democracy by a permanent political class, an oligarchy consisting of not only the best candidates big money can buy, their focus groups, advance teams, donor bases, and consultants, but also the journalists who cover the prefab story, the pundit caste of smogball sermonizers, the spayed creatures of the talkshow ether, and aparatchiks in it for career advancement, agenda enhancement, a book contract, or a coup d'etat".

- John Leonard, The Black Album.

A brave woman

or foolish?

Oops

John Schellnhuber says twelve "tipping points" for climate change have been identified so far, according to this report. They are the Sahara desert; the Amazon rainforest; the stratospheric Ozone hole; the Greenland ice sheet; the Tibetan plateau; salinity valves ("pinch" points between adjacent seas); the North Atlantic current; El Nino; the West Antarctic ice sheet; methane clathrates; the South Asian monsoon; and the [Southern] circumpolar current.

Face-eating monkeys

"Ray Kurzweil's vision of the future strikes me as very sad. We will live forever, we will adopt new gadgets mere moments after they are invented, and we will have nanotech solar panels that are, well, really awesome.

You know what? I don't care. TV, cellphones, email, nanotech, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering: are any of us made happier by all this? I think the opposite is true - we are increasingly isolated, alienated and neurotic.

While we draw ever-closer to Kurzweil's singularity, the horrors of the world continue unabated, and Kurzweil seems to have next to nothing to say about that. His vision of the future is devoid of humanity, even as he insists that being human is defined by 'going beyond our limitations'. The tragic point that escapes him is that our most important limitations, the ones we really need to go beyond if we are ever really to be happy, have nothing whatsoever to do with technology".

Ben Haller, Menlo Park, California - Letter to New Scientist magazine, 15 October

"Hatred disfigures..."

"... It makes a stone of the heart, as WB Yeats wrote. Where it becomes a dominant element in a person’s political expression, it corrodes the ability to think, to make judgments, to connect to the true reality of things, to persuade. As a result, it cannot produce a serious, humane politics. This was part of Karl Kraus’s truth when he wrote: 'Hatred must make a person productive; otherwise, you might as well love'.

It is fortunate that Pinter’s profound dramas come from a different place than his shallow, vulgar and myopic political views. But insofar as his award will be celebrated for his politics as much as for his art, these two giant figures are closer than they know – trapped in a shrill, polarising language that does a disservice to democratic public discourse. This is not just Margaret Thatcher’s or Harold Pinter’s tragedy, but of many of their political opponents. In short, of modern Britain itself".

David Hayes on Harold Pinter and Margaret Thatcher.

David Harvey review

My review of A Brief History of Neoliberalism is here.

"Only he who changes...

...remains true to himself". Wolf Biermann

"Brazil is not for amateurs"

At a seminar yesterday Leslie Bethell, Director of Oxford's Centre for Brazilian Studies, offered an analysis of the nature and extent of Brazil's political crisis (see also Arthur Ituassu).

He thinks the what has happened under the PT is of a different order from previous scandals. The party still has a massive grass roots support base, but it has been significantly weakened, and a defeat for Lula in the presidential election of 2006 - once unthinkable - is a real possibility now that "he has lost the urban middle class irrevocably".

It would be great to see a version of Bethell's talk published and easily accessible.

A Brazilian analyst whose name I didn't catch said she feared a turn by Lula towards populism. Bethell agreed that "on some days" Lula was deeply impressed by Hugo Chavez and that this was "worrying", as was the murder of [name?] that some had linked to Lula's private secretary.

So much to get to grips with here. What else helps towards understanding of background, context and present? How about, for example, Peter Robb's A Death in Brazil?

March of folly?

"This week I had the opportunity to have a debate with one of the leaders of the [Gaza] settlers in front of an audience of high school students, aged 16 or 17. It was a rare opportunity, because the nationalist Ministry of Education generally uses its fearful power to prevent people like me from being invited to school debates. After a shower of the settler's demagogic phrases - 'Jewish blood', 'All Arabs are animals', 'Mahmoud Abbas is a bastard like Arafat', 'The Arabs understand only force' - I conveyed a simple message: Let's make peace while we are strong. Instead we are doing the opposite". Uri Avnery, Salaam or Salami, 8 Oct (thanks to Stephen Marks of Jews for Justice for Palestinians for refering to this).

Is this right? Israel only seems to be getting stronger, as - for example - Jonathan Freedland points out in The canny Sharon's one and threequarter state solution (12 Oct).

[P.S. Avnery told the pupils: "Listen carefully to what [the settler] says and ask yourself: what is he offering you - except kill and be killed, be killed and kill, from here to eternity"]

Sarowiwa living memorial

On 21 Oct Platform and others launch a season for Ken Saro-Wiwa (www.remembersarowiwa.com). Among the proposals for a Living Memorial is an idea from Frances Newman, Jeff Jackson and Knott Architects "to transplant flora of the Niger delta to the [London] petrol forecourts that are destroying it".

Globalisation's missing link

"Labour is globalisation's missing link. The flow of workers across borders is heavily impeded, leaving the global market for labour far more distorted than those for capital and commodities. The world price of capital may be set in America, and that of oil set in Saudi Arabia. But there is no such thing as a world price of labour. Wages can differ by a factor of ten or more depending only on the passport of the wage-earner, according to Dani Rodrik".

- from Be my guest, a useful piece in The Economist (6 Oct), which says the most consequential of 33 recommendations from Kofi Annan's Global Commission on International Migration is a call for more temporary migration from poor countries to rich ones.

Can it work? Reportedly, the Commission argues that the interests of rich and poor countries can be aligned. Rich countries want migrants' labour, but do not want to look after these newcomers when they grow old, never mind other political issues. 'Temporary and circular migration' is also better for poor countries because it brings more in remittances. "The longer an immigrant stays away from home, the smaller the share of his wages he sends back".

It sounds promising, in theory. Would Dani Rodrik's proposed limit - up to 3% of host country workforce - be about right? And would even the very best temporary migration schemes - assuming they're truly feasible - make sufficient or any difference to the pressures bringing people across the Sahara towards Europe?

The big melt

"All told, one quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas resources lies in the Arctic, according to the United States Geological Survey" (As Polar Ice Turns to Water, Dreams of Treasure Abound).

"Predictions vary from the catastrophic to the cataclysmic" (Earth - melting in the heat?) .

"If we don't do that, who will?"

I asked [Scott] Smith [president and publisher of the Chicago Tribune Company, which in 2004 had $5.7bn in revenues] how he responds to [newspaper] reporters who ask why a fifteen percent profit margin is not enough. He replied, "It's the equivalent of saying, 'I wrote a really good story yesterday, but that's the best I'll ever do'. Our premise is that we can improve". The question is: Improve the paper or the profits?

from Fault Line - Can the Los Angeles Times survive its owners? by Ken Auletta, The New Yorker, 10 October

"Former friends now drank each other's blood"

Temple Grandin’s thoughtful review suggests that Frans de Waal’s “Our Inner Ape” is worth careful study. And De Waal’s own comment We’re all Machiavellians is also instructive.

The more you look, the more similarities between humans and other apes there are.

But even – perhaps especially – ethologists and comparative psychologists should be cautious about making normative judgements about humanity.

The idea De Waal champions that humanity has “two inner apes” – the aggressive chimp and the peaceful bonobo – may well help us think about what’s going on, but only to a limited extent. Humans are neither chimps nor bonobos.

Similarly, Grandin’s conclusion that “De Waal's most hopeful message is that peaceful behavior can be learned” looks just great; but – strictly from the evidence cited – that conclusion can only be applied to juvenile rhesus and stumptail monkeys in the study.

There may well be evidence from historical, political, cultural and other studies of humans that peaceful behaviour can be learned, but one should be cautious about a “message” from even the most careful study of other animals.

Pilgrim

Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there - Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Now that's xxxxxx up

[President Bush's] speech came one day after the White House threatened to veto a bill onto which the Senate added a ban on the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" against prisoners of the American government. This president could not find the spine to veto a bloated transportation bill that included wildly wasteful projects like the now-famous "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska. What kind of priorities does that suggest? (Doing the 9/11 Timewarp Again)

Beyond The Gate

Having, back in 1988-90, studied the nature of Saddam's regime, I was, in 2002 and early 2003, still in a grey area not too far from the fringes of what George Packer reportedly calls "the tiny, insignificant camp of ambivalently prowar liberals" (see That Global Emotion). So I’m looking forward to reading Packer’s new book The Assassin's Gate, noting the following reviews among other so far.

Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times (Grand Theories, Ignored Realities) welcomes it warmly and finishes with a direct quote with which Kakutani presumably agrees:

If his assessment in these pages of the Bush administration is scorching, it is because [Packer] writes as one who shared its hopes of seeing a functioning democracy established in Iraq and who now sees the chances of that happening dwindling in the wake of the administration's bungled handling of the war and occupation…

"Swaddled in abstract ideas," [Packer] writes, "convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, [the US administration] turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one. When things went wrong, they found other people to blame. The Iraq War was always winnable; it still is. For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive."

Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun (Moral Luck and the Iraq War), welcomes it as the best book yet written on the war. He says it "demonstrates beyond a doubt the administration's failure to plan for the inevitable postwar occupation".

Michael Hirsch in the Washington Monthly (Confessions of a Humvee Liberal) is tougher on Packer, concluding:

Wars are always deadly, no matter how perfectly planned. That's why one tries so hard to avoid them—and why the whole idea of a "war of choice" is a sin in itself. George Packer, one of the very best chroniclers of America's Iraq experience, should know that better than almost anyone. If only he had told us.

David Glenn in the Columbia Journalism Review (Unfinished Wars) notes:

Packer remains as committed as ever to the principle of liberal interventionism, even if in a highly chastened form. "You can’t lose that impulse entirely," he says, "or else you become Henry Kissinger."

..."I took almost a pleasure in watching my preconceptions start to crumble,” [Packer] says. “I knew that, even though personally and politically that’s a painful thing, as a writer it’s where the action would be."

Anthony Barnett, who was against the war, says:

"Packer's qualities as a writer and observer mean that you can draw different conclusions from the evidence he reports than he himself might wish, and this makes him a true journalist in the very best sense" (personal communication).

And the larger context – the US and global economic and geopolitical context in which this all takes place? Perhaps that should include critiques of both John Lewis Gaddis’s Surprise, Security and the American Experience (insightful but misguided?) and David Harvey’s The New Imperialism and Brief History of Neoliberalism.

Dummer and umma

Al-Qaida’s current status as an apparently free-floating and stateless group, it must be recalled, is for Osama bin Laden and his cohorts very much a second best. Al-Qaida began life and long continued its operations with the support of states:

• 1980s, phase one: activity in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States
• 1990-96, phase two: work alongside the Islamist revolutionary regime in Sudan to export revolution to Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Eritrea
• 1996-2001, phase three: operations from Afghanistan, as an ally of the Taliban government

Al-Qaida is a state-centred group in a further, highly important, sense: its goal is to take power in specific Islamic states and establish a new form of authoritarian government, a caliphate.

Fred Halliday: A transnational umma - reality or myth?

Le Grand Voyage

...looks interesting.

Who are these guys?

According to Paul Rogers (6 Oct), Iraqi insurgents have been described in at least five different ways by the US administration. First they were "dead enders", then "remnants", then "hired guns", then (reluctantly) "nationalists", then "foreign jihadists".

Both Rogers and Godfrey Hodgson (3 Oct) concur with my response to Mark Danner (11 Sep) that Iraq is too important for US forces to leave.

Rogers concludes, as you would expect, that a continued US presence in the region will be a fundamental strategic mistake:

"For those dedicated radicals who expect it to take several decades to establish their caliphate, the prospect of a few more years of opportunity to train and harden thousands of young jihadists is almost too good to be true. On current trends, it is also exactly what they are likely to get".

But will the US, British and Israeli governments up the ante - going as far as the use of nuclear weapons against Iran sooner rather than later? Or will they settle for a diminished sphere of influence, centred on a Kurdish entity (ideally in a pragmatic non-confrontational stance towards EU-looking Turkey) in uneasy co-habitation with a Shi'ite dominated government in Baghdad that plays both (Iranian and Western) sides and does just enough to keep the Saudis onside? Will neither of these options be open?