Recent Bookmarks and Annotations
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A 2007 warning: the world's twelve worst ideas Fred Halliday - openDemocracy on 2007-03-26
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AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: Diary of a Guantánamo Attorney on 2007-01-21
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attorneys are required to turn their client notes over to the government after visiting prisoners. I naively asked, "What about attorney-client privilege?" This, like so many other protections and legal principles, doesn't apply to Guantánamo.
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four years after being captured (and more than one year after the Supreme Court affirmed their right to hearing and counsel) individuals were still being held without legal representation.
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I fell into the world of Guantánamo in October 2005. The Chicago Council of Lawyers had organized a luncheon discussion on the legal issues surrounding the infamous detention facility at the U.S. naval base in eastern Cuba.
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Next target Tehran | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited on 2007-01-15
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In the aftermath, the US will support regime change, hoping to replace the ayatollahs with an Iran of the regions. The US and British governments now support a coalition of groups seeking a federal Iran.
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Donald Rumsfeld and the AEI have developed a strategy for regime change in Iran that does not involve a ground invasion. Weapons of mass destruction will provide the rationale for military action, though it won't be limited to attacks on a few weapons factories. It will include limiting Iranian retaliatory capability, using bombers to destroy up to 10,000 targets in the first day of any war, and special forces flying in to destroy anything that's left.
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The political context as seen from inside the White House and Downing Street is that we are in a war as serious as the second world war.
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Bush has sent forces to the Gulf that are irrelevant to fighting the Iraqi insurgents. These include Patriot anti-missile missiles, an aircraft carrier, and cruise-missile-firing ships.
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BBC NEWS | Business | M&S unveils carbon-neutral target on 2007-01-15
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M&S said the carbon savings it aimed to achieve under its plan would be like taking 100,000 cars off the road each year.
As well as cutting energy and using more renewable materials, M&S will aim to source its food from the UK and the Republic of Ireland as a "priority" in an attempt to reduce air freight.
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Under its "eco-plan", the company says it will cut energy consumption, stop using landfill sites and stock more products made from recycled materials.
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http://www.haloscan.com/comments/raldanash/116768511569507955?url=http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/01/10-questions-for-heather-mac-donald.php on 2007-01-14
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Gene Expression: 10 Questions for Heather Mac Donald on 2007-01-14
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I have always been amazed that the liberal media is willing to let stand the right's equation between "religious voters," "values voters," and opposition to gay marriage, abortion, and stem cell research. There is no necessary relation between being religious, having values, or opposition to stem cell research or gay marriage, in my view. That having been said, the current obsession with homosexuality on the part of the Religious Right would seem to assure it a political relevance for the Republican Party for some time.
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But as much as I yearn to live in a world that could produce such beauty, I have to recognize that this is the best of all possible times to be alive. I don't know how many of us would give up our astounding array of choices, despite their costs above all in family stability, to go back to a time of more restricted individual autonomy.
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the puzzling logic of petitionary prayer. What was the theory of God behind prayer websites, for example: that God is a democratic pol with his finger to the wind of public opinion?
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I tried to point out that conservatism has no necessary relation to religious belief, and that rational thought, not revelation, is all that is required to arrive at the fundamental conservative principles of personal responsibility and the rule of law
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A cancer survivor who claims that God cured him implies that his worthiness is so obvious that God had to act.
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What was the theory of God behind prayer websites, for example: that God is a democratic pol with his finger to the wind of public opinion?
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Is the idea that if only five people are praying for the recovery of a beloved grandmother from stroke, say, God will brush them off, but that if you can summon five thousand people to plead her case, he will perk up and take notice: "Oh, now I understand, this person's life is important"? And what if an equally beloved grandmother comes from a family of atheist curs? Since she has no one to pray for her, will God simply look the other way?
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Fragmented Future on 2007-01-08
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Mexico is a notoriously low-trust culture and a notoriously unequal one.
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Finally, most of the immigrants, with the possible exception of the Eritreans, came from countries where only a chump would trust neighbors he wasn’t related to, much less count on the government for an even break.
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This kind of Robert D. Putnam-endorsed good citizenship proved difficult in Uptown, however, precisely because of its remarkable diversity. The most obvious stumbling block was that it’s hard to talk neighbors into donating money or time if they don’t speak the same language as you. Then there’s the fundamental difficulty of making multiculturalism work—namely, multiple cultures. Getting Koreans, Russians, Mexicans, Nigerians, and Assyrians (Christian Iraqis) to agree on how to landscape a park is harder than fostering consensus among people who all grew up with the same mental picture of what a park should look like.
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The high crime rate didn’t help either. The affluent South Vietnamese merchants from the nearby Little Saigon district showed scant enthusiasm for sending their small children to play in a park that would also be used by large black kids from the local public-housing project.
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Lloyd noted, “Prof Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, ‘the most diverse human habitation in human history.’”
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Foreign Policy In Focus | World Beat | Vol. 2, No. 1 | Iron Fist Economics on 2007-01-04
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The sad truth is that in both China and the United States—and many places in between—democracy is often seen as a pesky obstacle to “getting the job done.” Iron-fist economics appeals to dictators and CEOs alike.
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despite the insistence of the late Milton Friedman and Francis Fukuyama, the relationship between market economics and democratic practice is far from a settled question.
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Since launching economic reforms in the late 1970s, the Chinese government has promoted rapid economic growth but without much in the way of political liberalization
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Under Yeltsin, Moscow tried to introduce markets and elections at the same time. See what happened? The country practically imploded.
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Al Jazeera English - Middle East on 2007-01-03
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"They supported the existence of alleged weapons of mass destruction ... It took them the destruction of a country, murder of hundreds of thousands of its people, to realise they were wrong. Personally, I think they knew it was wrong from the beginning but they wanted it this way, because they are simply an arm for their governments not for truth and neutrality as they promote themselves."
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Bakri expressed surprise that no Western media outlet has ever apologised to its readers for promoting false Iraq war pretexts.
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Mustafa Bakri, chief editor of the Egyptian newspaper El-osboa, said the attitude of the Western media is unsatisfactory when it comes to any issue in the Arab world, not only Iraq.
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He said: "In their coverage of the current Palestinian issues, they are backing Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, to such an extent that it is basically the US and Israeli view.
"Look at their coverage of last year’s attack on Mar Jerjes Churge [a Christian church in Cairo] in Egypt, their coverage was provoking, unprofessional and seemed designed to create a rift between Egypt’s Muslims and Christians."
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Abu Muhammad voiced resentment at the the term "Sunni insurgency", saying that Iraqis from different backgrounds are fighting the foreign presence in Iraq.
"This term plays down Iraqi nationalism," he said. "I repeat, I am a Shia and I am resisting the US forces in Iraq, and we know for sure that resistance fighters from all background are fighting. Why do the Western agencies insist that only Sunni are fighting? Big question mark, I think."
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"Western media always put question marks around this community and speak of it in the same breath as terrorism. They portray it as a community that is still incapable of comprehending the new Iraq; hence, it is not qualified to play a role in a democratic process. Such allegations are backed by lobbies whose aim is to undermine Iraqi nationalism."
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The spokesman for the Arab Baath Socialist Party, which ruled Iraq from 1968 to 2003, who asked to be identified as Abu Muhammad for security reasons, said: "Most Western media outlets have been helping the US occupation authorities to portray the Baath party as a Sunni party which suppressed the Shia and deprived them of their rights.
"Actually, sect was never an issue in Iraq. I am a Shia and I have been a senior Baath official ... No Baath party official - no Iraqi official - ever asked me about my sect.
"When the US army occupied Iraq they issued a list of 55 wanted top Iraqi officials, starting with President Saddam Hussein; half of those senior officials were Shia.
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Al-Hashimi has also blamed the Western media for the feeling of deprivation among Iraq’s Shia, referring to phrases such as "the once-dominant Sunni", and "Sunni who enjoyed privileges under Baath Party rule" - widely used in news reports.
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Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq's Sunni Arab vice-president, says that one idea - widely accepted in the West as true but which lacks evidence to support it - has upset the balance of power in Iraq to such an extent that violence was an inevitable outcome.
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Information about Iraq propagated by Western media is often woefully inaccurate or downright wrong, according to leading Arab figures, and such distortions are damaging any chance of peace in the country.
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Where the figures came from to back up assertions of a large Shia majority are unclear: no Iraqi census in modern history has ever included sect.
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Western media often refer to Iraq as being "overwhelmingly Shia", or use other phrases to imply a large Shia majority. This, he says, is wrong - and it has resulted in over-representation of Shia parties in the Iraqi government at the expense of Sunni Arabs.
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LRB | Corey Robin : Dragon-Slayers on 2006-12-23
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In the second section of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt argues that imperialism’s animating impulse is expansion for expansion’s sake. Against the claims of some Marxists, she insists that capitalism provides a model, not a motive, for the imperialist, who patterns the acquisition of power on the accumulation of capital. The capitalist sees money as a means to more money. The imperialist sees every conquest as a way station to the next.
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If Arendt matters today, it is because of her writings on imperialism, Zionism and careerism.
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Composed during the 1940s and early 1960s, they not only challenge facile and fashionable applications of the totalitarianism thesis; they also eerily describe the dangers that the world now faces. By refusing to reckon with these writings, the journalists, intellectuals and academics who make up the Arendt industry betray her on two counts: they ignore an entire area of her work and fail to engage with the unsettling realities of their own time.
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The Bush administration is committed to the interests of its main constituencies: corporations, evangelicals, the military and big oil. It has revived the most toxic elements of American nationalism – not supranationalism – and though neo-conservatives may savour war for its own sake, Bush has folded their ethos into the rhetoric of national security and human rights. His party’s intrusions into the family and sexuality don’t reflect a general desire to dissolve the public and the private – Republicans happily respect the freedoms of employers – but are rather an effort to shore up the power of husbands and fathers. Whatever one may think of these warring antagonists, it is difficult to see how their aims are anything but political, their weapons anything but strategic and rational.
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But as virtually every intelligence analysis has shown, Islamist radicals are driven by hostility to the state of Israel and repressive Arab regimes, US patronage of Israel and those regimes, and, in Europe, discrimination against Muslims and support for US policies in the Middle East. Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, recently said that British suicide bombers ‘are motivated by perceived worldwide and long-standing injustices against Muslims; an extreme and minority interpretation of Islam promoted by some preachers and people of influence; and their interpretation as anti-Muslim of UK foreign policy, in particular the UK’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan’. The Islamists’ grievances are local and specific. They are not the flotsam and jetsam of mass society or a globalised world; they come from and return to mosques, schools, parties and close-knit neighbourhoods. Suicide bombing is primarily a response to foreign occupation, and terrorism is, as it always has been, the weapon of choice for people with little power or no mass base.
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Ideology and terror reinforced this grip. Racism and Marxism confined their adherents in a ‘straitjacket of logic’, lending the world a spurious consistency and relieving people of ‘the freedom inherent in man’s capacity to think’. By reducing men and women to the barest animal life, terror ensured that no one would resist ideology’s law of nature, in the case of Nazism, or history, in the case of Stalinism. Because ideology ‘may decide that those who today eliminate races’ – or classes – ‘are tomorrow those who must be sacrificed’, terror must ‘fit each of them equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim’. The purpose of totalitarianism, in short, was not political: it did not fulfil the requirements of rule; it served no constituency or belief; it had no utility. Its sole function was to create a fictitious world where anxious men could feel at home, even at the cost of their own lives.
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