You can't make this up....

Read a funny tidbit the other day, distributed by Tom Ford. I have no idea whether this is true or even plausible but the idea of the followers of Mohammed drinking his piss is hilarious (and disgusting).

Robert Putnam on social isolation

Robert Putnam, the prophet of social capital, and his co-researchers have found a very interesting connection between diversity and social isolation, suggesting that the ideal of multiculturalism -- a diversity in cultures and peoples within the same community -- actually fosters the decay of community and promotes isolation and anomie. Food for thought...

Conservatism and anti-immigration

Chris Morris, over at politics@aqute referred me to this oped in the New York Times. The claim is that it is not one's political color that determines attitudes towards immigration, but a smoldering clash of elites versus 'the people'. Quite similar to the popular explanations for the rise of Pim Fortuyn and populism in European politics.

Since not all of you will have acces to the archive, I took the liberty to infringe on copyrights...

June 12, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist


The
Next Culture War

By DAVID BROOKS

The conventional view is that an angry band of conservative activists driven by nativism and economic insecurity is killing immigration reform. But this view is wrong in almost every respect.

In the first place, immigration is not now, nor has it ever been a primarily partisan issue. A Pew Research Center poll released last week found that 36 percent of Republicans support the bill, along with 33 percent of Democrats and 31 percent of independents. That's hardly a party-line chasm.

In the second place, immigration attitudes have never dovetailed neatly with
racist or nativist ones. Hostility to immigration often increases in periods when racist attitudes are on the decline. Moreover, established immigrants are nearly as suspicious of new and illegal immigrants as native-born Americans.

And in the third place, decades of research have failed to show any clean link between economic insecurity and anti-immigrant views. Pollsters ask voters if they feel their own wages are affected by immigrant labor. There is no strong connection between feelings of personal risk and anti-immigration opinions. Some studies find no link at all between income levels and those views.

What's shaping the immigration debate is something altogether deeper and more interesting. And if you want to understand what it is, start with education. Between 1960 and 1980, the share of Americans enrolled in higher education exploded. The U.S. became the first nation in history with a mass educated class. The members of this class differed from each other in a thousand ways, but they tended to share a cosmopolitan approach to the world. They celebrated cultural diversity and saw ethnocentrism as a sign of backwardness.

Their worldview, which they don't even understand as a distinct worldview, was well summarized by Richard Rorty, who died this week. The goal of any society, he wrote, was to create "a greater diversity of individuals larger, fuller, more imaginative and daring individuals." Social life should widen. New cultures should be explored. And, as Rorty concluded, "Individual life will become unthinkably diverse and social life unthinkably free." Liberal members of the educated class celebrated the cultural individualism of the 1960s. Conservative members celebrated the economic individualism of the 1980s. But they all celebrated individualism. They all valued diversity and embraced a sense of national identity that rested on openness and global integration.

This cultural offensive created a silent backlash among people who were not so enamored of rampant individualism, and who were worried that all this diversity would destroy the ancient ties of community and social solidarity. Members of this class came to feel that America's identity and culture were under threat from people who didn't understand what made America united and distinct.

The two groups clashed whenever a political issue arose that touched on America's identity or role in the world: immigration, free trade, making English the official language or intervening for humanitarian reasons in Kosovo or Darfur.

These conflicts were and are primarily cultural clashes, not economic or ideological ones. And if you want to predict which side a person is likely to be on, look at his or her educational level. That'll be your best clue.

As the sociologist Manuel Castells generalized, "Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local." People with university values favor intermingling. People with neighborhood values favor assimilation.

What's made the clashes so poisonous is that many members of the educated class don't even recognize that they are facing a rival philosophy. Many of them assume that anybody who disagrees with them on immigration and such must be driven by racism, insecurity or some primitive atavism. This smug attitude sends members of the communal, nationalistic side into fits of alienation and prickly defensiveness. It's what makes many of them, in turn, so unpleasant.

The bottom line is that the immigration debate is part of a newer culture war that has succeeded the familiar and fading culture war. This longer culture war is not within the educated class. It's not the '60s versus the '80s. It's to mimic Mark Lilla ­ between the people who have absorbed both the '60s and the '80s, and everyone else.

It's between open, individualistic cosmopolitans and rooted nationalists. It's between those who ride the tides of the cultural mainstream and those so driven by marginalization that they're destroying the best compromise they will get.

Secret detention for children of suspected terrorists?

Dear all,

Just heard an interview with a spokesperson from Amnesty International on the radio. Looked up the exact press statement and the documents to which it refers. (Here: http://www.amnesty.nl/voor_de_pers_artikel/20216

and here:

http://www.amnesty.nl/documenten/rapporten/US%20Responsibility%20for%20Enforced%20Disappearances%20in%20the%20War%20on%20Terror.pdf)

In this last document look at page 19, which documents cases of secret detention by the USA of relatives and children of suspected terrorists is described, including the "treatment" they received. These are well documented cases and all the (part circumstancial) evidence shows that this is not a hoax.

I (almost) have no words to describe my outrage at a policy that incarcerates young children (as young as 6 years old), denies them food, subjects them to insects crawling over their body, all in an effort to find out the whereabouts of their father and perhaps to make him expose himself such that security forces can apprehend them. I may be biased as a parent, but I find that perverse, morally bankrupt, despiccable, cowardly and loathsome. This policy of secret detention is already immoral imho, but to apprehend innocent children is below everything.
What is most cynical is the statement to the effect that

"We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children...but we need to know as much about their father's recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care."

What the fuck?!? As if the presence of some psychologists makes it OK to subject children to such treatment?!? Imagine it were your being picked up by the CIA and subjected to such treatment because they need to know as much as possible of your recent activities. Fucking cowards!

Sorry to be so explicit...