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26 Apr 09

Heirs to Fortuyn? by Bruce Bawer, City Journal Spring 2009

Article by Bruce Bawer, on why stalwarts of the Left in Europe, gays in particular, are abandoning social-democratic multicultural politics. ...But, while things may be all right in Denmark, there are other countries where the backlash is creepy:
QUOTE
The situation in Spain is a reminder that not all “right turns” are created equal. If the Danes have affirmed individual liberty, human rights, sexual equality, the rule of law, and freedom of speech and religion, some Western Europeans have reacted to the mindless multiculturalism of their socialist leaders by embracing alternatives that seem uncomfortably close to fascism. Consider Austria’s recently deceased Jörg Haider, who belittled the Holocaust, honored Waffen-SS veterans, and found things to praise about Nazism. In 2000, his Freedom Party became part of a coalition government, leading the rest of the EU to isolate Austria diplomatically for a time, and last September, his new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, won 11 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. Or take Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has called the Holocaust “a detail in the history of World War II” and advocated the forced quarantining of people who test HIV-positive—and whose far-right National Front came out on top in the first round of voting for the French presidency in 2002. The British National Party (BNP), which has a whites-only membership policy and has flatly denied the Holocaust, won more than 5 percent of the vote in London’s last mayoral election. Then there’s Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), formerly Vlaams Bloc, whose leaders have a regrettable tendency to be caught on film singing Nazi songs and buying Nazi books. In 2007, it won five out of 40 seats in the Belgian Senate.
UNQUOTE

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bruce_bawer city_journal immigration multiculturalism islam feminism europe

Yet instead of encouraging these immigrants to integrate and become part of their new societies, Western Europe’s governments have allowed them to form self-segregating parallel societies run more or less according to sharia. Many of the residents of these patriarchal enclaves subsist on government benefits, speak the language of their adopted country poorly or not at all, despise pluralistic democracy, look forward to Europe’s incorporation into the House of Islam, and support—at least in spirit—terrorism against the West. A 2006 Sunday Telegraph poll, for example, showed that 40 percent of British Muslims wanted sharia in Britain, 14 percent approved of attacks on Danish embassies in retribution for the famous Mohammed cartoons, 13 percent supported violence against those who insulted Islam, and 20 percent sympathized with the July 2005 London bombers.
Ubiquitous youth gangs, contemptuous of infidels, have made European cities increasingly dangerous for non-Muslims—especially women, Jews, and gays. In 2001, 65 percent of rapes in Norway were committed by what the country’s police call “non-Western” men—a category consisting overwhelmingly of Muslims, who make up just 2 percent of that country’s population.
8 more annotations...
- In Germany, reports Der Spiegel, “a disproportionately high percentage of women who flee to women’s shelters are Muslim”; in 2006, 56 percent of the women at Norwegian shelters were of foreign origin; Deborah Scroggins wrote in The Nation in 2005 that “Muslims make up only 5.5 percent of the Dutch population, but they account for more than half the women in battered women’s shelters.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch advocate for democracy and women’s rights, would no doubt say far more than half: when she was working with women in Dutch shelters, she writes, “there were hardly any white women” in them, “only women from Morocco, from Turkey, from Afghanistan—Muslim countries—alongside some Hindu women from Surinam.”
- One measure of the dimensions of this shift: owing to the rise in gay-bashings by Muslim youths, Dutch gays—who ten years ago constituted a reliable left-wing voting bloc—now support conservative parties by a nearly two-to-one margin.
- These two factors—immigration and the economy—are intimately connected.
- The last few decades in Europe have made three things crystal-clear. First, social-democratic welfare systems work best, to the extent they do work, in ethnically and culturally homogeneous (and preferably small) nations whose citizens, viewing one another as members of an extended family, are loath to exploit government provisions for the needy. Second, the best way to destroy such welfare systems is to take in large numbers of immigrants from poor, oppressive, and corruption-ridden societies, whose rule of the road is to grab everything you can get your hands on. And third, the system will be wiped out even faster if many of those immigrants are fundamentalist Muslims who view bankrupting the West as a contribution to jihad.
- But the heavily hyped “national integration plan” that she introduced the following year rested on such half-measures as an increase in the number of government-sponsored German classes, an effort to encourage immigrants to play sports, and (incredibly) a program that addressed wife-beating—permitted by the Koran and extremely common in Muslim communities—by offering advice on the Internet. Merkel actually described these pathetic gestures as a “milestone”; Broder, more accurately, calls them “make-believe action,” another way to avoid conflicts in her coalition.
- The situation in Spain is a reminder that not all “right turns” are created equal. If the Danes have affirmed individual liberty, human rights, sexual equality, the rule of law, and freedom of speech and religion, some Western Europeans have reacted to the mindless multiculturalism of their socialist leaders by embracing alternatives that seem uncomfortably close to fascism. Consider Austria’s recently deceased Jörg Haider, who belittled the Holocaust, honored Waffen-SS veterans, and found things to praise about Nazism. In 2000, his Freedom Party became part of a coalition government, leading the rest of the EU to isolate Austria diplomatically for a time, and last September, his new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, won 11 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. Or take Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has called the Holocaust “a detail in the history of World War II” and advocated the forced quarantining of people who test HIV-positive—and whose far-right National Front came out on top in the first round of voting for the French presidency in 2002. The British National Party (BNP), which has a whites-only membership policy and has flatly denied the Holocaust, won more than 5 percent of the vote in London’s last mayoral election. Then there’s Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), formerly Vlaams Bloc, whose leaders have a regrettable tendency to be caught on film singing Nazi songs and buying Nazi books. In 2007, it won five out of 40 seats in the Belgian Senate.
- The situation in Spain is a reminder that not all “right turns” are created equal. If the Danes have affirmed individual liberty, human rights, sexual equality, the rule of law, and freedom of speech and religion, some Western Europeans have reacted to the mindless multiculturalism of their socialist leaders by embracing alternatives that seem uncomfortably close to fascism. Consider Austria’s recently deceased Jörg Haider, who belittled the Holocaust, honored Waffen-SS veterans, and found things to praise about Nazism. In 2000, his Freedom Party became part of a coalition government, leading the rest of the EU to isolate Austria diplomatically for a time, and last September, his new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, won 11 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. Or take Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has called the Holocaust “a detail in the history of World War II” and advocated the forced quarantining of people who test HIV-positive—and whose far-right National Front came out on top in the first round of voting for the French presidency in 2002. The British National Party (BNP), which has a whites-only membership policy and has flatly denied the Holocaust, won more than 5 percent of the vote in London’s last mayoral election. Then there’s Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), formerly Vlaams Bloc, whose leaders have a regrettable tendency to be caught on film singing Nazi songs and buying Nazi books. In 2007, it won five out of 40 seats in the Belgian Senate.
- Gary Younge’s 2007 piece in The Nation: in europe, it’s the old right that’s full of hate. According to Younge, “the primary threat to democracy in Europe is not ‘Islamofascism’ . . . but plain old fascism. The kind whereby mostly white Europeans take to the streets to terrorize minorities.” This was nonsense on a breathtaking scale: though the rise of parties like the BNP is indeed distressing, the truth remains that for every act of anti-Muslim violence in Europe, there are—to make an exceedingly conservative guess—100 acts of Muslim-on-infidel violence.

10 Apr 09

David Byrne Journal: 03.07.09: Good Investments and Bad Investments

Scroll down for the part I bookmarked this article for ("We Live in a Virtual World"). Amazing image comparison, great commentary by David Byrne. The Redbook cover (with its perfected, photoshopped woman), compared to the original photo of the "plainer" model is amazing because it shows how it's the accretion of *detail* that makes for the overall effect - which cuts both ways, insofar as it makes the model more "perfect" and beautiful, and insofar as it's more pernicious. There's no One Big Thing you can point to that's wrong with the "improved" version. It's in the aggregate, which takes on an insupportable weight.

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body_image feminism photoshop

- note: curve of shoulders/ back eliminated; arm made more slender; subcutaneous fat on back above waist removed; waistline slimmed and back stretched; collarbone tendons' shadowing removed - these details have the effect of giving the model an *effortless* lightness and a lift that's nearly impossible to attain (you can see it's not easily possible because of the strains, such as curved shoulder/back and flexed tendons around collarbone showing in the original).
  
  In the face, the photoshopped version achieves a similar effect of effortlessness - which is pernicious, insofar as no one can really achieve it effortlessly, yet you (if you're female) might think there's something wrong with you (or men might think you're haggard or a shrew) if you don't have that aura of floating on air. To whit: all indications of physically straining to hold the pose are erased, the face is turned into a smooth mask; the lines/pouches under the eyes indicate the effort involved in smiling so brightly, so they're erased; the lines running from nose to mouth corners, which indicate similar strain, are also erased; the face is lightened, which suggests there's no added blood pumping through the system to keep all this going - it's just easy/ effortless - and so the woman is literally drained of vital signifiers, imbued instead by an ethereal, angelic perfection ...that is anything but effortless or easy to achieve, much less maintain. - on 2009-04-10
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09 Aug 08

CityStates: Commentary on an Urban World: Kalokairi Calling: Mama Mia! and 'Redesigning the American Dream'

Michael Dudley, who only the other day came out with a brilliant analysis of The Dark Knight, now looks at Mama Mia! across a range of feminist texts as well as some urbanist readings. Fascinating stuff, a must-read...

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michael_dudley city_states_blog movies popular_culture feminism mama_mia!

Nowhere does Tip O'Neill's famous aphorism that "all politics are personal" apply more potently than to America's so-called "culture wars", where anything seen to be remotely touching on conceptions of the family becomes not just the stuff of political campaigns, but the difference between personal fulfillment and a lifetime of frustration and unhappiness.
we're not concerned strictly speaking with the family as such, but with all those structures on which men, women and their families must depend, be they based in public policy or how we design our cities.
6 more annotations...
- The strength and independence of the film's female characters, as well as the nonchalance with which the film deals with Donna's sexual history, have gained the attention of feminist writers, who see in the film a wonderfully subversive social critique as Sarah Seltzer explains:
  
  "It's hard to imagine a movie
  that's come out recently that is, at its core, as offensive to the
  right wing's so-called family values. The film's women -- including a mother
  and daughter -- accept each other as sexual beings. Donna isn't punished
  for her earlier promiscuity, and Amanda isn't forced to get married
  despite her clear sexual maturity. The concept of three men revolving
  around a matriarchal family core is celebrated."
- While the power of the women in the film is indeed refreshing, I think what is more remarkable still is something larger: that these women have a community with whom to be empowered, and a physical setting that helps to make such empowerment possible.
- what we see in the taverna and village on Kalokairi is to most North Americans quite foreign: an extremely dense social environment where families live in close proximity, where everyone knows each other, and the visual and auditory permeability of the village means that everyone
  also knows each other's business (which of course is being sung at full
  volume, but still).
- But the essential element that lends such joie de vivre to the film is that it is ultimately about a community of people, one that nonjudgmentally accepts one another and is there to celebrate life's passages and transitions together.
  
  The contrast to the urban loneliness in that other big "chick flick" of the summer, Sex and the City, is striking, as Jane Becker notes:
  
  "The women in 'SATC' are a good 20 years younger than their
  counterparts in 'Mama', but they seem infinitely less happy. They sit
  around coffee shops and trendy restaurants discussing their
  unhappiness. The women in 'Mama' sing and dance. Christine Baranski kicks ass on
  the dance floor, Julie Walters chews through the scenery and
  Meryl…well, Meryl does a split in the air after bouncing off a bed. When I grow up, I want to be them."
- In 1980, Delores Hayden famously asked, "What Would a Non-Sexist City be Like?" and her proposals for Redesiging the American Dream share much in common with Kalokairi: closely-set multifamily housing sharing common facilities such as kitchens and child care, locally employed and equitably paid on-site staff to help out, attractive social gathering and play spaces, and a community of families to assist in looking after children.
- The irony is that the conservative agenda behind the "family values" debate is promoting a "traditional" family model that is in fact an historical aberration. For the past half-century, through a combination of social policy and urban planning decisions guided more by myth than reality families have been forced into unprecedented, community-eroding isolation. As Hayden and other feminist architects, planners and geographers have been pointing out for years, these patterns have served the needs of women and families very poorly.

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