Month: September 2011

Dublin, Ireland, 10.46 am

That’s how Max Fisher frames the Saudi King’s new proclamation on women and elections:

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah announced Sunday that Saudi women will finally be permitted to vote and even run in municipal elections starting in 2015, an enormous symbolic gesture toward women’s rights that will make little actual difference in Saudi Arabian politics, where voting and elected bodies are both largely irrelevant. Still, symbolism matters, and the mere fact that the king felt compelled to do this suggests that women could already be exercising a new level of political influence.

Juan Cole situates the move as part of a general, but possibly insufficient, attempt to stave off a revolt. Zeinobia wants the Saudi women’s movement to take their win in hand and refocus on the “right to drive” campaign.

President Obama related the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in a speech to the Congressional Black Caucus over the weekend ("You know the story — it’s about three young men bold enough to stand up for God, even if it meant being thrown in a furnace. And they survived because of their faith, and because God showed up in that furnace with them"). Most of the media coverage of the event centered on his "fiery address" but stopped short of parsing the president's deeply biblical message. Mollie Ziegler is puzzled: 

The speech goes on and on with religious imagery, but it looks like it was picked up by precisely two media outlets…[I]t’s weird that any story about the White House forgetting to send out a Christian holiday proclamation gets hundreds of hits while any story indicating Obama’s familiarity with a Bible story gets downplayed to the point of almost a blackout. And the thing is that I’ve covered Obama enough to know that he drops stuff like this somewhat regularly. If the sermon at whatever church Michele Bachmann happened to visit in Iowa one day gets coverage…surely a presidential speech built completely around the faith of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego might be worthy of something, right?

(Image: A depiction of the story in the Catacombs of Priscilla, Rome, Italy. Late 3rd century / Early 4th century, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Maybe austerity is working:

We should and will await more data, not to mention data revisions, but in the meantime it is correct to be surprised by the much-better-than-expected Irish growth performance, and at a difficult global time at that; you can’t claim the American and European growth locomotives pulled them out of the slump.  This expert on the Irish economy offers a sector-by-sector breakdown of the new numbers and he too admits he was surprised.

Steve Benen sees the "apology tour" lie as central to Romney's candidacy:

This plainly dishonest claim is at the core of Romney’s entire campaign message — it’s in every speech; it’s in every debate; it’s even in the title of his book. And the underlying point of the lie isn’t just over some routine policy dispute — Romney desperately wants Americans to question the president’s love of country. The “apology” claim is a lie, but it’s also an ugly smear. The fact that Romney repeats this incessantly says a great deal about his character, or in this case, the lack thereof.

Yes, it's U-G-L-Y ugly. And dumb. The last thing we need as America faces what could be a deep historical shift away from being the undisputed global hegemon is a president unable to see flaws in his own country's politics or economics or history … in order to correct them. And the reason for Obama's attempt to acknowledge some faults in America's recent past was a simple one: the catastrophe of the Bush-Cheney foreign policy legacy. Rebuilding soft power is not unpatriotic. Regurgitating complacency with a hint of McCarthyism is.

Real-time facial filters? I think he looks great as Michael:

Face Substitution from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

There's been a fair bit of outrage over John Mearsheimer's endorsement of avowed anti-Semite Gilad Atzmon's new book. Jeffrey Goldberg feels vindicated:

In this new book, Atzmon suggests, among other things, that scholars should reopen the question of medieval blood libels leveled against Jews– accusations that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make matzo, and which provoked countless massacres of Jews in many different countries. If you recall from the fight over "The Israel Lobby," which Mearsheimer wrote with Stephen Walt, of Harvard, the authors claimed that they were simply writing a critique of American foreign policy, and of certain American citizens who, they said, "distorted" foreign policy. Many of us disagreed.

Both David Bernstein and Pejman Yousefzadeh feel compelled to walk back their defenses of Mearsheimer. The realist, meanwhile, defends himself:

Goldberg's indictment of Atzmon does not rely on anything that he wrote in The Wandering Who? Indeed, Goldberg's blog post is silent on whether he has actually read the book. If he did read it, he apparently could not find any evidence to support his indictment of Atzmon. Instead, he relied exclusively on evidence culled from Atzmon's own blog postings. That is why Goldberg's assault on me steers clear of criticizing Atzmon's book, which is what I blurbed. In short, he falsely accuses me of lending support to a Holocaust denier and defender of Hitler on the basis of writings that I did not read and did not comment upon…Goldberg's charge that Atzman is a Holocaust denier or an apologist for Hitler is baseless. Nor is Atzmon an anti-Semite.

I have a hard time commenting on this since I have not read the book in question, although Atzmon strikes me as a disturbed figure wont to write obviously explosive things. Here is Mearsheimer's view of the dude:

Atzmon is a universalist who does not like the particularism that characterizes Zionism and which has a rich tradition among Jews and any number of other groups. He is the kind of person who intensely dislikes nationalism of any sort. Princeton professor Richard Falk captures this point nicely in his own blurb for the book, where he writes: "Atzmon has written an absorbing and moving account of his journey from hard-core Israeli nationalist to a de-Zionized patriot of humanity."

Atzmon's basic point is that Jews often talk in universalistic terms, but many of them think and act in particularistic terms. One might say they talk like liberals but act like nationalists. Atzmon will have none of this, which is why he labels himself a self-hating Jew. He fervently believes that Jews are not the "Chosen People" and that they should not privilege their "Jewish-ness" over their other human traits. Moreover, he believes that one must choose between Athens and Jerusalem, as they "can never be blended together into a lucid and coherent worldview." (p. 86) One can argue that his perspective is dead wrong, or maintain that it is a lovely idea in principle but just not the way the real world works. But it is hardly an illegitimate or ignoble way of thinking about humanity.

From Alexander Nazaryan's takedown of Michel Pastoureau's The Bear: History of a Fallen King:

In cave paintings, in fact, "the bear, except for man, is the only living creature that is shown upright," which is what politicians would call a special relationship. The bear is the emblem of Artemis; a she-bear nursed the prince Paris, the same who later fancied Helen. King Arthur, rock star of the Middle Ages, was an "ursine divinity," according to Pastoreau. And for the pagan tribes of Germany, "the bear was much more than the king of the forest … it was the quintessential totemic animal."

And that is precisely the problem. The early Church tended to not practice much tolerance toward pagan rites, subverting those it found attractive (the whole Virgin Mary business) while suppressing those it feared would threaten its stature. The brown bear of the European forest, with its unchecked aggression and appetites, clearly fell into the latter category. 

Thus, circa 1100 C.E., the Church launched what Pastoreau regards as a massive smear campaign to wean Germans, Scandinavians, and Europeans off their ursine adoration. This was done by denigrating the bear while promoting theretofore "lesser" animals such as lions; the process was made easier by the fact that while anyone who came into contact with a bear was not likely to emerge with sound life and limb, lions were distant enough that Church scribes could paint them as they wished.

(Image by Jill Greenberg for her book Bear Portraits, via My Modern Met)

The parallels:

[Perry] muffed his attack lines because he hadn't bothered to study them. He wasn't prepared for the tuition fight because he figured that he could just repeat the same old explanations and flash his thousand-watt smile at the audience. He didn't know what to say about Pakistan because he figured any sort of good ol' boy BS would do. It always has before, after all. So he's apparently spent the past month doing….nothing.

That's just way too Palinesque for the political pros.