philosophy.com
'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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In his Just and Unjust Wars (1977), Michael Walzer argues that we must make two separate evaluations of the morality of war: the justice of the cause or purpose for which war is fought and the morality or justice of the methods of warfare. Just cause is usually understood in terms of a self-defense against physical aggression is putatively the only sufficient reason for just cause. The consensus is that an initiation of physical force is wrong and may justly be resisted. Just methods is conventionally understood in terms of the rule that military responses must be proportional to the military provocation, and the rule that civilians must never be intentionally attacked. The inference is that even a just war must be waged justly. Thus Israel is entitled to defend itself, but is not entitled to do so disproportionately or to wage war on civilians. Israel was judged to Israel...- Iraq syndrome?
Ira Chernus has an article at TomDispatch that talks about the Iraq syndrome in terms of the victory culture that motivates the desire for empire as a way to address domestic security. Chernus says: Victory culture assumes that the United States is bound to win in the end -- that, in fact, we deserve to win because our motives are less self-interested than those of other nations. We may sometimes fight a war ineptly or incompetently, but we always mean well at heart. We want democracy, prosperity, peace, and stability -- not just for ourselves but for everyone. And: And in victory culture, we kill only because others are out to ambush and kill us. We are by definition the victims, the innocents, never the perpetrators. That whitewashes our motives, whatever they may actually be...To go on believing that we are virtuous, we must go on seeing ourselves as profoundly... - Indigneous communities: violence +sexual abuse
Louis Nowra has an article in the Australian Literary Review about male violence and sexual abuse in Indigenous communities. He says: In 2005 I spent several days in the Alice Springs hospital after falling ill while attending a friend's wedding ..... What disturbed me...was that the most common sight in the hospital was Aboriginal women and girls with severe injuries suffered during domestic violence. Some of their faces looked as though an incompetent butcher had conducted plastic surgery with a hammer and saw. The fear in their eyes reminded me of dogs whipped into cringing submission. The confronting evidence of what men had done to the women was almost unbearable. He adds that: The Alice Springs hospital provides a clear example: about 800 Aboriginal women were treated for domestic assault last year, up from 351 in 1999. The rate of domestic assault in indigenous communities is eight to 10 times... - religious fundamentalism + enlightenment
Anne Applebaum's op-ed in the Washington Post entitled The Gall To Speak Her Mind is about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, her journey from tribal Somalia, through fundamentalism, and into Western liberalism and about reason, faith, multiculturalism and the integration of millions of Muslim immigrants into European culture in Infidel. She argues there is no place for tolerance of religious fundamentalism within a nation based on enlightenment principles. The implication is that Muslims need to abandon the faith of their fathers and mothers and that a necessary condition for being European is to abandon their religion. What is rejected is a large tolerance for cultural diversity in favour of a "liberal monoculture," in which Muslims adopt Western values. Taken up by Pascal Bruckner in Sign and Sight, wit has sparked a debate about the Enlightenment and multiculturalism that has relevance to debates in Australia over arguments that Muslim migration is more problematic... - globalization and global cities
The social and spatial configurations of Sydney and other global cities (such as London) have been significantly reâshaped in recent years by three forces: â postâindustrialisation, globalization and migration. The first is the uneven transition from an industrial to a postâindustrial economy--- a shift towards the service and information economy. Globalization refers the new forms of the âglobalâ economy, based on the multiânational capitalist corporation and augmented financial flows, which began to emerge in the midâ1970s. The third force is migration, which is a consequence of the other two. The ethnic, social, and cultural diversity that results necessarily from migration is changing the face of the modern urban landscape and reconfiguring the social divisions and conflicts characteristic of soâcalled âglobalâ cities. In Divided city: the crisis of London at New Democracy Stuart Hall asks: The question is how the cartography of the contemporary city is being reâconfigured under the impact... - Londistan: Melanie Philips in Australia
Melanie Philips, a journalist at the British Daily Mail and author of the book Londonistan, was recently in Australia to give the Quadrant lecture at a Quadrant dinner in Sydney, Australia, 1 March 2007. Philips argues that London is a Londonistan in that "mass immigration, multiculturalism and the onslaught mounted by secular nihilists against the country's Judeo-Christian values" are destroying British nationhood. The greatest danger to the west lies in the way it has been attacked and undermined from within, a process that is continuing and which threatens to hand liberal democracy over to its Islamic enemies who are laying siege to it from without. She claims that ordinary folk in Britain and Australia feel that they are betrayed and let down by the media and intellectual and political class who try to shut down this debate. Multiculturalism is to blame for this state of affairs---multiculturalism has failed; even worse,... - media +politics
An article by Manual Castells on communication, power and counterpower in the networked society. It argues that the media have become the social space where power is decided, and that with the rise of a new form of communication, mass self-communication over the Internet and wireless communication networks, insurgent politics and social movements are able to intervene more decisively in the new communication space. Castells says: So, in sum: the media are not the holders of power, but they constitute by and large the space where power is decided. In our society, politics is dependent on media politics. The language of media has its rules. It is largely built around images, not necessarily visual, but images. The most powerful message is a simple message attached to an image. The simplest message in politics is a human face. Media politics leads to the personalization of politics around leaders that can be... - rhetoric +public sphere.
A quote from Larval Subjects on rhetoric as a public reason: Rhetoricians sometimes like to claim that we need to return to the rhetorical tradition preceding the Enlightenment. This, for instance, is one of Sharon Crowleyâs theses in a book that I highly recommend. However, in my view Crowley fails to examine the Enlightenment thinkers in context or to analyze the relationship between these thinkers and the great Greek and Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism, Roman rhetoricians. Figures such as Cicero and Seneca were almost deified by thinkers like Hume and Diderot because of their great commitment to civic life and engagement with the public sphere. Indeed, Hume was extremely euridite where ancient philosophy was concerned, having encyclopedic familiarity with the Greek and Roman rhetoricians, and the Enlightenment thinkers modelled their own conception of philosophy on the Romans. Their philosophy was a very public practice, premised on social... - biopower and sovereignty
Sergei Prozorov in this article in Foucault Studies states: Despite evident differences, Agambenâs and Hardt and Negriâs approaches are both marked by the conflation of sovereign and biopolitical modalities of power. While Agambenâs Homo Sacer presents an ontological thesis on the originary indistinction between sovereignty and biopolitics that are linked in the figure of âbare lifeâ as their product, Hardt and Negriâs argument posits a quasiâempirical indistinction of the two forms of power as a result of the âepochal transformationâ of late modernity, whereby the sovereignty of the nationâstate gives way to the âbiopolitical sovereigntyâ of the decentred Empire....Ultimately, biopower becomes little more than a new, fancier term for sovereign power or, alternatively, sovereignty becomes generalised to embrace additional objects of rule. Prozorov argues for the irreducible difference between biopower and sovereignty.... - Arendt: interpreting the political in modernity
Is the modern interpretation of the political an impoverished one because it eschews deliberation? Is the modern interpretation of the political further impoverished in that it restricts the scope of the political to an exclusively technological, social, and economic framework? Has politics become the administration of the population, understood as a totality of âhuman resourcesâ to be preserved, enhanced, and optimized in which the language is one of security, organization, and efficiency? The issues are explored by Frederick M. Dolan in The Paradoxical Liberty of Bio-Power:Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault on Modern Politics I will deal with Arendt.She says yes to the above questions as I would. But I'm not clear on what her argument is in The Human Condition. So let us have a look.... - Condoleezza Rice defends empire
Since 1989, the end of the cold war left has seen the United States become the "sole superpower" in th world of nations. This is usually interpreted in terms of a benevolent American world hegemony or empireâa Pax Americana, and this understanding is assumed, in one or another form, in policy and political circles.The professional foreign policy community assumes that the international system is "naturally" headed toward an eventual American-led consolidation of democratic authority over international affairs. William Pfaff in Manifest Destiny: A New Direction for America in the New York Review of Books says that he most coherent and plausible official articulation of such reasoning was offered in the summer of 2003 by Condoleezza Rice, then President Bush's national security adviser, speaking in London at the annual meeting of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Pfaff say that Rice argued that: ...the time had come to discard the system... - Guantánamo Bay: No Exit
The New York Review of Books has an article on Guantánamo Bay entitled 'No Exit' by Joseph Lelyveld. This was republished by the Australian Financial Review in today's 'Friday Review' section but it is not online. Lelyveld says that the US Supreme Court has also cautiously asserted its jurisdiction on detention issues, picking apart arguments made on behalf of an executive branch that hubristically called on the Court to stand aside and, essentially, let the President reign. He adds: Butâas the remaining 395 captives at Guantánamo enter the sixth year of their imprisonment without a single one of them having been put on trialâthe question of whether we're prepared to hold terrorist suspects without charge for the rest of their natural lives has yet to be squarely addressed by either Congress or the courts. Decisions on detention issues have been handed down and laws have been passed. Some of these... - Legal Morality and Australian Republicanism
Charles Harpur and Dan Deniehy both saw human progress in moral terms. Their view of the end of human development was moral perfection where violence, war, unethical behaviour etc all became morally impossible. They connected moral progress to republicanism through the removal of tyranny from government with republican technologies - such as constitutionalism, democracy, universal rights etc. Their insight was that increasing liberty enabled a greater and purer expression of morality. This can be taken to its conclusion where a morally perfect humanity does not require governance. For a religious 19thC, that result can also be described as a return to Eden. Cesare Beccaria wrote: Whoever reads, which a philosophic eye, the history of nations, and their laws, will generally find, that the ideas of virtue and vice, of a good or a bad citizen, change with the revolution of the ages: not in proportion to the alteration of circumstances,... - inside Guantanamo Bay
President Bush has said, âIâd like to end Guantánamo. Iâd like it to be over with.â Yet he refuses to close it because, he says, it holds detainees who âwill murder somebody if they are let out on the street.â Guantánamo is the single most potent symbol in the misguided war on terror. In the wake of 9/11, the United Statesâ pledge to do everything in its power to protect its people from further harm led to a policy of overreaction. H. Candace Gorman, a civil rights attorney in Chicago who blogs at The Guantanamo Blog is able to visit a client of hers at Guantanamo.... - questioning Zionism
The American Jewish Committee, is a well known defender of Israel, and it has a high public profile of speaking out against anti-Semitism in the US. This is a key institution of the Israeli Lobby, and it has recently published a paper entitled Progressiveâ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism by Alvin H. Rosenfeld. This targets liberal Jews who are wrestling, or are uncomfortable, with Zionist ideology. The latter critique Zionism due to it being a religious nationalist ideology that has helped foster violence and to justify a brutal occupation of the Palestinian territories. The New York Times reports that the Rosenfeld essay has created controversy in the US....
