by J. M. Tyree

“Facts just twist the truth around…” -Talking Heads

During the run-up to the referendum on Britain’s relationship with the European Union, I noticed a persistent commercial for SlimFast weight-loss shakes being broadcast on the non-BBC channels. A sultry voice suggested: “Have a go, ladies, and see what you can do.” That’s pretty much what the angry and aging voters of England and Wales decided for themselves and the rest of Britain. The tagline of the commercial and the product slogan – “Works for Me” – struck me as remarkable. SlimFast wasn’t guaranteeing that their product worked, or that it worked in any specific, quantifiable, medically verifiable way. But the idea that it “Works for Me” suggested that it might work for you. In fact, the product might or might not work at all, but the company could always say that they never said it did, exactly. Brexit was not as advertised, not As Seen on TV.

This curiously philosophical commercial popped to mind when I watched a series of interviews with the residents of Stoke-on-Trent, a heavily Labour area that went 70% for Brexit. One pottery producer said that production might need to be cut due to economic uncertainty and reduced demand in light of Brexit. But an angry-looking woman retorted to the BBC’s cameras that the media should come back in twelve months and see how much better everything would be after Brexit. “I can’t wait for it to happen,” I think she said. (But if things were going so swimmingly, what was she so angry about?) Brexit might not work – not actually work, not in reality. Most experts predict a recession, potentially a bad one. (The “so-called experts” were cast into a somewhat similar position to a doctor or trained nutritionist advocating that there might be other ways to slim down.) But the real historical consequences don’t matter, because we’re living in a post-truth era of SlimFast politics. Ladies, Brexit “Works for Me.” As Katharine Viner, the Editor of The Guardian, put it in her Brexit Op-Ed, “How Technology Disrupted the Truth,” “When ‘facts don’t work’ and voters don’t trust the media, everyone believes in their own ‘truth’ – and the results, as we have just seen, can be devastating.”

It’s tempting to call this phenomenon The Americanization of Facts, although in truth it’s a global feature of enbubbled media, characteristic of Russia Today television broadcasts as much as the British tabloids and the Fox News Channel. Americans might be tempted to roll their eyes at the seeming shock of British liberals about this situation – been there, done that, here we go again. The problem goes beyond garden-variety bias or even propaganda. Instead, we conform to a consumerist conception of truth as something that we select from a menu of choices. The inside-out thinking of Madison Avenue and the logic of climate-change denial has become basic to our era’s entire zeitgeist.

Read more »

by Holly A. Case

James Baldwin

Dost Mektupları (Letters of a Friend) is a collection of correspondence between James Baldwin and the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar (pronounced Jezzar). Although they were written in English with a spattering of French (Baldwin) and Shakespearean English (Cezzar), the letters have only been published in Turkish. This may seem odd, but if you know much about Baldwin, one of the things you probably know is that the estate has mostly forbidden publication of his correspondence, and denied biographers permission to cite directly from his letters.

What this means is that in Letters of a Friend, readers of Turkish can glimpse a side of Baldwin that few have seen: Baldwin in his own words to a friend. Except that Baldwin's words are in Turkish, and Baldwin didn't know Turkish…

Bear in mind that excerpts from the letters cited hereafter have been translated from English into Turkish by a translator, and then back again from Turkish to English by me. I have not seen the texts in English. My translations may therefore bear only an impressionistic resemblance to the original.

The title of Baldwin's first novel is Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). In Letters of a Friend, this title appears in Turkish several times. On page 16, it's rendered as Git Onu Dağlara Söyle, which translates literally as Go Sing It to the Mountains. The word for “tell” and “sing” are the same in Turkish, which seems appropriate, given that Baldwin's title is also the name of a well-known song. A footnote tells us this is the title under which the book was translated in Turkey, but I can't find it anywhere. On pages 43 and 54, the title is given as Çık Dağ Başına Orada Anlat, which translates as Go Out and Tell It There on a Mountaintop, which is closer to the injunction in the original, if still somewhat awkward.

Part of the problem is that “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” which is the title of an African-American spiritual composed the year the Civil War ended (1865), does not quite ring with the same soulful ecstasy in Turkish, even when it is correctly translated. All of the cultural resonance of the phrase—the pain and sorrow of enslavement, the hope of freedom, Protestantism with a rhythm profoundly unlike the Lutheran populist pounding of “A Mighty Fortress is Our God”—is absent from the Turkish.

Read more »

by Thomas R Wells

Liberalism is a centuries old political project of taming the power of the state so that it works for the ruled not the rulers. Can it survive the security state midwifed by global terrorism? Only if we take back responsibility for managing the dark political emotions of fear and anger that terrorists seek to conjure.

How do we resist the security state?

First, by challenging its effectiveness. PRISM and the other opaquely named universal surveillance programmes seem to have been approximately zero use in predicting terrorist attacks before they happen; last year the TSA failed to detect 67 out of 70 weapons and explosives carried by mystery shoppers. Security expert Bruce Schneier characterises the counter-terrorism security measures that increasingly dominate our experience of public spaces as mostly theatrical, designed to “make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security”. (And actually they can't even manage that.)

Second, by challenging the cost-effectiveness of the security state even if it worked as it is supposed to. The loss of our privacy is not a small price to pay for preventing terrorism and saving lives. Firstly because we should be consistent. If we wouldn't give up privacy rights to reduce minor risks of death in other contexts (like installing government cameras in every bathroom to save people from bathtub slips), what rational reason do we have for giving up all our privacy to the government to reduce the risk of terrorism from almost nothing to possibly slightly less? Secondly because privacy is not an ornament but the heart of liberalism. In a liberal society the people should be mysterious and the government should be transparent; the more these are reversed the further we go towards despotism.

But there is a further problem with the security state besides its ineffectiveness and inefficiency: It is a fundamentally incoherent project. Its justification is to provide citizens with freedom from fear, yet in order for the security state to gain the powers and money to do this it must relentlessly terrify the public with claims about how real and significant the terrorist threat is! Thus, the security state is constitutively unable to achieve what it is supposed to do, and itself becomes a greater source of public fear about terrorism than terrorists themselves could hope to be.

Read more »

by Carl Pierer

Perception lies at the heart of our everyday life. Both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein have derived radical philosophical results from paying close attention to the structures of our perception. This essay attempts to illustrate a deep affinity between the two thinkers: not only do both discover a common dualistic ontology underlying their opponents' view, but they also face similar difficulties in trying to overcome this dualism. While Merleau-Ponty's project in the Phenomenology of Perception remains unfinished, it is Wittgenstein's radical conception of the philosophical project that allows him to truly subvert the dualism.

Merleau-Ponty's analysis uncovers aspects of perception that are inherently paradoxical for empiricism and intellectualism: “Thus there is a paradox of immanence and transcendence in perception. Immanence, because the perceived object cannot be foreign to him who perceives; transcendence, because it always contains something more than what is actually given.” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 16)

Empiricism claims that all knowledge is derived from experience. Experience is grounded in the sphere of transcendence: the external world, things in themselves, objects. For empiricism, there is a direct input from this sphere, an atomic ‘sensation', and the richness of perception is constituted of such atomic ‘sensations'. However, as Merleau-Ponty shows, this ignores the fact that perception is always already meaningful: “To perceive is not to experience a multitude of impressions that bring along with them some memories capable of completing them, it is to see an immanent sense bursting forth from a constellation of givens without which no call to memory is possible.” (Merleau-Ponty 2014, p.23)

In this way, immanence, i.e. interiority, consciousness, and subjectivity, becomes an issue for empiricism: if the perceived object is not to some extent familiar in advance, in other words, not already meaningful for us, there is no point at which the richness and meaning of perception could be constituted. This thought is developed and motivated in great detail in the early chapters of the Phenomenology.

Read more »

by Richard King

“The King is dead! Long live the King!” Thus did the English aristocracy mark the death of a monarch, with words that at once acknowledge change and insist on continuity – on the idea that divinely sanctioned kingship not only survives the King's demise but also alights immediately on the next in line, on the dead monarch's heir. It would be difficult to conceive of a more effective way of perpetuating and shoring up class power. One king carks it, another takes his place, or is deemed to have done so by God Himself …

Today's elites lack such brazenness, but they are no less convinced of their right to rule. For they too posses the uncanny ability to declare themselves existentially challenged and at the same time move to consolidate their position. Faced with pressure from without, or below, the old habits of mind reassert themselves: by some weird magic or historical instinct the establishment is able to transcend defeat even as it acknowledges it: “The establishment is dead! Long live the establishment!”

Take the case of post-referendum Britain. After the shock of the Brexit vote and David Cameron's resignation, everyone from the grandees of the major parties to the opinion writers in the mainstream press seemed to be noisily convinced of the following three things: one, that Brexit was yet more evidence of how disconnected the political establishment now is from that amorphous constituency “the people”; two, that this fissure in the political soil heralded some major ideological earthquake, and subsequent tectonic realignment, to which the major parties would have to respond if they didn't want to be cast into history's dustbin; and, three, that the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn – the man who, in transforming Labour into something like a mass social movement, had taken on, and is still taking on, the very establishment deemed to be in crisis – should resign his leadership immediately.

Read more »

by Leanne Ogasawara

Pinochet. Chavez. Trump? After decades of suffering under populist autocrats, Latin Americans have a message for the Gringos: Welcome to our world.

So begins a great article in Politico by Ben Wofford.

So many times over the past several years, I have wondered how America managed to turn into a bonafide banana republic in little over two decades.

How had it happened?

With surging inequality at levels approaching Latin America,infrastructure is no longer obviously first world and the divide between elite and the rest in terms of education, health and overall prospects is simple stunning…. what happened to the American dream, right?

So given this state of affairs, I suppose it shouldn't be so shocking to see a “strongman” rise up. It is the cult of his personality and that of his family, along with the populist promise of “taking on the elite” based on nothing whatsoever than the mere fact that he says, “believe me.”

As Wofford writes:

Scholars, writers and public officials across the continent report that Trump is viewed with horror and fascination by many Latin Americans. They emphasized that Trump has caudillo qualities they way Pinochet had medals: Cult of personality, rage against the elite, unbridled machismo, an acerbic disregard for the rules—coupled with an apparent willingness to break them at nearly any cost.

Wow, they even have a word for it down there: caudillo.

Read more »

by Chris Bacas

(Midnight in Moscow, Chapter 1 is here.)

En route from Petersburg, adrenaline and second-hand nicotine kept me awake at first. Eventually, I slept through the cabin heat and sparking wheels; waking up in Moscow weak, achy and slightly dizzy. Everything finally caught up with me. For that day, we planned on Red Square, Kremlin and a home-cooked meal. His tomb closed, Lenin was in for regular maintenance: change of embalming fluid and new fan belt.

We made a stop at my colleagues' apartment. He had business there and a lesson for me. A neighbor of his survived the Nazi blockade. Now bed-ridden, she would tell me the story. One of her children let us in. A TV quietly hummed with peppy pop music, expertly sung and mostly minor-key. My friend sat nearby in the darkened apartment. I pulled a chair next to the couch bed. She greeted me warmly despite obvious pain. Slowly, with somber translation, she told how scores of people dropped over daily and lay where they fell. Exhausted crews cleared their bodies. Her husband, athletic and lean, went quickly. Parents fed children all their rations until the inevitable end. Grass, bugs, pine needles and bark were staples. In the twilight parlor, tchotchkes and framed photos blurring, the velocity of life slowed and upended. Blankets tucked chin high, her voice corkscrewed into me; a warmer echo of the Petersburg sleeping car. It cut furrows into the puny real-estate of my experience. The agony of a vast nation and unknown people is a mirage. Its' contours and colors shimmer and fade in pace with our false distance. One moment made that span an arm's length. In the hallway, roasted meat, pine-scented cleaners and dusty carpet smells hung thick. We said goodbyes and thanks, while she told my host her time was nearly up.

At dinner, the food was fantastic and hospitality warm. In a Russian meal, the starters: salads, beans, soup and sautés are so tasty, it takes tremendous effort to save room for the main courses. The Russian method of vodka-drinking requires great strength: glasses hold 2-3 ounces and get refilled for toasting many times. I tried kvass, a rye-flavored soda. It delighted me, after growing up with “Pennsylvania Dutch Birch Beer”. I ended the meal happy, stuffed and fully delirious with flu.

Back at my colleagues' apartment, his tenant offered to treat my condition. We went upstairs to a neighbors' for the prescription. One placed tumblers on the table and peeled a few inch-thick garlic cloves. He poured full glasses of hot-pepper vodka and encouraged me to eat the garlic. I chewed up the biggest clove, my mouth and nose burning. We raised the tumblers.

“Nazdarovya!”

Read more »

by Ram Manikkalingam

I am sitting in Colombo, Sri Lanka. We are at peace and are enjoying real democracy after more than three decades of civil war and almost five years of creeping authoritarian rule under the previous president. I spend half my time in Amsterdam, just a two-hour train ride to Brussels and a couple more to Paris – sites of so many attacks recently. It is surreal that Europe, the continent I went to, to avoid being targeted by terrorism in my country, is now becoming less and less safe while Sri Lanka has become an island of peace and democracy. While the cost of how we did it can be debated, and continues to be, there is no denying that we ended up in a good place for all of us in Sri Lanka, and the world too.

Meanwhile, (with perhaps a small degree of schadenfreude) I watch Europe become tense, turn in on itself, exclude communities, become subject to attacks, impose emergency law, and break apart with Brexit. I ask myself what is really going on in Europe. While we may draw a direct line from the invasion of Iraq to the attacks against civilians in Paris and Brussels, that alone is insufficient to explain why young men in Brussels and Paris will travel thousands of miles away to join a movement with which they have little social, cultural or political affinity. And it simply does not even begin to explain Brexit, Scottish nationalism, or Marie Le Pen. Maybe, just maybe, it might be more useful to start in Europe and ask how have things changed in the past decade since I have been living there. What do I see now that I did not see before? And how would I describe the politics of Europe to someone who had never been there, not experienced it, and needed to understand it better?

For all its progress and enlightenment, Europe is still a continent of Tribes – Big Tribes, Small Tribes and New Tribes. Big Tribes have their own state. Within this state they feel dominant (or at least feel that they ought to be). These Big Tribes may be as big as the English and French or as small as the Dutch and Danes. What they have in common is they live under their own political roof. Then we have the Small Tribes. These are invariably the Tribes that live within the borders of a state the Big Tribes dominate. These Tribes range from the Scots and the Northern Irish, to the Basques, the Tyroleans and the Corsicans. They yearn for a political roof that is closer to them. Or at least they reject the political roof that has been built on top of them by others who are more powerful then they. And finally you have the New Tribes. These are Tribes related to Europe’s colonial project. Some arrived during colonialism, others after colonialism ended, and still others continue to enter today. This Tribe is viewed as foreign by the Big Tribes. But they are, or at least feel they are, as European as the other two Tribes. Let me unpack each of these Tribes a little further.

Read more »

by Michael Liss

“You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.” —Mario Cuomo, 1985

If Hillary Clinton does not become the next President of the United States, I have a feeling that whatever her regrets might be about emails and Benghazi, she's going to spend most of her remaining years wondering just how fate led her to be married to one political genius, be outmaneuvered by, lose to, and then serve under a second, and get jack-hammered by a third.

Bill, of course, was in his own league. Even now, with his fastball diminished by age, he can still conjure up a Luis Tiant-like variety of curves, knucklers, and other off-speed stuff. But in his prime, Bill had all the tools. He was the Muhammed Ali of politics. He could float, he could dip and dodge and shuffle and rope-a-dope, he could even sting like a bee (or hit like a mule) when needed, and all the while spouting his own special brand of poetry. Bill had another gift as well, less apparent, but there. He was a triple threat—not only a puncher and a poet, but also a worker, a real policy wonk who dove deep into the details. I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons Bill and Hillary stayed together through all of Bill's “adventures” was that they respected in each other the same quality—the willingness to keep at it doggedly until the task was accomplished, the staying power of plodders who won't give up. There was a price, of course, to Hillary's perseverance, as, to this day, she still carries a Clinton Bulls-Eye on her back—for his sins as well as her own.

When, in 2008, she reached for the nomination she was sure was hers, she couldn't possibly have expected that a second generational talent would stand in her way—Barack Obama. Yes, he gave a phenomenal speech at the 2004 Convention, but she clearly did not see him as a serious threat for the top spot. Obama looked Vice-Presidential to her—the guy who could go on her short list and perhaps even be an effective surrogate, but was more likely headed back to the Senate for more seasoning.

Hillary became the first national victim (John McCain and Mitt Romney would follow) of Mr. Obama's secret weapon—he's a lot like Derek Jeter in his prime, underestimated for being overestimated. What many of the President's political opponents have never quite grasped is that the extraordinary arc of his life is of his own design, not some mad spasm of feel-good political correctness. Behind the star status, and the poetry that enrages so many, is a cool organizing intelligence, a deliberateness, a carefully thought-out ground game. Obama doesn't punch much (his historic “first” status certainly constrains him), but he can grind it out with the best of them.

Read more »

by Paul North

Wind is low on the list of the awe-inspiring invisible powers. In other eras it ranked among the top forces beyond human control, blowing us this way and that. Today we think of wind as easily harnessed for human uses, as a mild amusement or nuisance, or as a fairy-tale character with puffed up cheeks and pursed lips.

If those lips could talk, we would hear some stories about uncontrollable forces. Although there hasn't been much talk of wind lately, a serious anemological investigation has been being carried out over the last three decades by the anime director Hayao Miyazaki. Wind is always blowing in Miyazaki, or almost always. Nevertheless, it doesn't always do the same thing. The main question driving his investigation into wind is: does wind liberate us or blow us in the direction of our destiny? One thing does stay steady across his films. Whatever we do on and in the wind, we never gain control over it. This doesn't mean that wind is in control of us. Miyazaki's is a control-less view of fate. Wind is the basic element in a fluid cosmic system that strews and carries, resists and supports, lifts upward and slams to earth with abandon. Where fate is King, wind is his advance scout, his highest ambassador and field marshal. It decides nothing: wind simply executes. In contrast, fate is rather abstract, a faint inkling of limits on what you can do or hope. When you face fate, however, you don't face a concept but a force. Wind is the force against which you push when you resist your fate, and when pushed, wind reveals itself to be only air. And you cannot push against air.

You can however ride it. Many things ride the wind in Miyazaki's landscapes. Pollution. War machines. Clouds. And depending how it is ridden, depending whether your calculations include the wind as the most salient factor, your endeavors may come out well or extremely ill.

In classical myths and tales wind is either a brutish force or a changeable force. The Aesop's fable about the North Wind and the Sun tells of wind's brutishness. Sun and North Wind argue: who can strip a traveler's clothes off more quickly? Wind goes first, blowing its all. Yet it doesn't loosen a button. Sun only shines on the traveler long enough and she starts to undress of her own accord. Persuasion wins over force—that's the moral of the tale. Both are forces—soft, effective persuasion and brutish, direct assault. But as a form of force, the sun is more pernicious. It disguises its violence as reason and presents its strength as gentility. Worse than this, whereas it exerts deadly force, the force appears to come from the victim—the traveler believes the decision to undress has been a free decision of her own. In contrast, the cold North Wind, Boreas, comes openly and directly, and human ingenuity can resist it, at least when it comes to clothing. Notice that both these fateful forces aim to render the traveler defenseless and naked, a plaything for nature's sadism.

Read more »

by Dave Maier

It’s been a while since my last music post, but I have to admit that the impetus for this one was less that fact, or even the release of Star Trek: Beyond, than the fact that I have not (*cough*) progressed far enough in my reading (even after finishing several more books – hey, it’s complicated!) to continue in a satisfactory manner from where I left off last time. So let’s go traveling instead (previous voyages here, here, here, here, and here).

This time: widgets! Although if you click the direct link to Mixcloud, you can access many other mixes without all the commentary.

Ashra – 77 Slightly Delayed Blackouts
Tangerine Dream – Exit Exit
Richard Pinhas – Iceland Part 2 Iceland
Eberhard Schoener – Meditation part 2 (exc.) Meditation
Jeff Greinke – Falling Away Lost Terrain
Pieter Nooten/Michael Brook – Finally II Sleeps With the Fishes
Terje Rypdal – Waves Waves
David Hykes & the Harmonic Choir – Lines to a Great Lord Harmonic Meetings

Our first mix is another time capsule from the 70s and 80s. The previous ones focused on some fairly obscure and hard-to-get material, but there’s no reason to avoid great music simply because it’s more generally available, right?

Ash Ra Tempel was one of the prime movers of the German space music scene in the early 70s, although their first efforts are more pan-stylistic lysergic freak-out – see this link for a comparison of their first album to Iggy Pop (!) – than the sequencer-driven Berlin-school material we hear later on, as in this track, the agreeably bouncy opener from 1977’s Blackouts, by which time guitarist and indeed sole member Manuel Göttsching had abridged the band name to Ashra. I love this picture, in which none of their faces is visible: drummer Klaus Schulze’s blocked by a cymbal, and Göttsching’s and bassist Hartmut Enke’s by their hair. Klaus must have liked the pic too, as he included it in the booklet of his retrospective album X in 1978, where I first saw it.

Read more »

by Humera Afridi

I arrived in Istanbul on the morning of July 3, fast on the heels of death.

Amjad Sabri, an eminent Pakistani qawwal—a Sufi devotional musician in the tradition of world-renowned Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and son of the famous singer Ghulam Fareed Sabri of the Sabri Brothers—had been shot dead in his car in Karachi ten days earlier by the Pakistani Taliban. He’d been praising the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and his noble family a little too much for the Taliban’s liking. And so they had their way with him. In a nation inured to violence, Sabri’s death, nevertheless, struck at the communal soul of Pakistan. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the messy confusion of Pakistan’s conflicted national and cultural identity, inflected with the scourge of Wahabism—a tyrannical interpretation of orthodox Islam imported from Saudi Arabia—temporarily dissipated.

Thousands of Pakistanis came out on the streets, united in grief, to protest Sabri’s death. Sabri was a child of Pakistan’s own soil. He belonged to a venerable, centuries-old musical dynasty. His spiritual attunement and the muscular faculty of his voice transported people to ecstasy, raising mere mortals above the denseness of an earthly, mired existence, above differences of class and wealth into a celebration of the Divine. Sabri’s music was a glorification. And it belonged to a distinct tradition of South Asian music, a legacy irrefutably inherent in the DNA of Pakistan, twinned to the devotional practice of Islam and its syncretic cultural roots in the region. Invoking a transcendent joy, Sabri’s qawwali created a milieu of harmony—completely antithetical to the Taliban’s backward, beclouded ideology of hate which thrives on sowing seeds of discord.

On June 28, six days after Sabri’s murder, a triple suicide bombing at Istanbul’s Ataturk International Airport, killed 42 and plunged Turkey—and the world—into shock and mourning. I arrived in Istanbul four days later, and in my mind the two tragedies, Sabri’s death and this latest devastation in Istanbul—and what they both symbolized—became intertwined into a single loss: that of a particular vibrational note, indeed, that of musical harmony. It seemed we were witnessing the slow disintegration of the last bastion of a modernist, secular state in the Islamic world. Of all cities, Istanbul, to me, is the most plausible custodian and embodiment of the kind of “perfect music” of which the Indian musician and mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan, whose teachings bridge East and West, spoke of so cogently.

Read more »

by Matt McKenna

Long before the new Ghostbusters film was released, a vocal group of internet commenters had already decided what the movie meant to culture at large. Some commenters thought that the main characters being women was an obvious indicator of an overly politically correct culture. Others thought that the existence of bitter comments about the main characters being women was an appalling indicator of a sexist culture. Battle lines were therefore drawn before the film hit theaters, and the content of the movie appears to be nearly as irrelevant to politically engaged adults as it is to the children who enjoy the Mattel-produced Ghostbusters-branded toy tie-ins. The ultimate combination of politically engaged people and consumerist children, however, met at the Republican National Convention last week. As with Ghostbusters, for politically engaged individuals, the content of the convention was entirely beside the point and merely provided an opportunity to consolidate their faction’s previously held beliefs.

The 2016 Ghostbusters stars Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, and Melissa McCarthy replacing Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson from the original 1984 film of the same name. As with the original, 2016’s Ghostbusters begins with a hapless character (this time played by Zach Woods) being surprised by a ghost. This first scene provides laughs and scares, but the film has trouble maintaining its positive momentum. Though the leads pepper the screen with mostly good jokes, their affability is drowned out by the gooey, disjointed action sequences in which the Ghostbusters crack wise while shooting apparitions.

But I've already wasted too many words on the content of the film–instead I should have written about how my seeing the film served to confirm something I already believe. After all, this is how politics in the United States works: events aren’t input into an opinion-making process, but rather they are shrewdly interpreted to justify a previously held opinion. The Democrat and Republican nominating conventions are prime examples of this sort of confirmation bias. The conventions are unadulterated pomp in which the only output is to remove the “presumptive” qualifier from the “presumptive nominee” title of the candidate who won the primary election. Therefore, the conventions aren’t introspective events where people think about candidates and concerns, but instead they’re places where dissent is squashed and re-branded as “unity.”

Read more »

by Bill Benzon and Mary Liebman

On April 27, 2016, Donald Trump opened a foreign policy speech by declaring that he would “develop a new foreign policy direction for our country – one that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace.” He closed by assuring, “American will continually play the role of peacemaker.” If he is serious, then if elected he should create a Peace Office in the White House, an office specifically charged with developing peaceful solutions to foreign policy problems.

For that matter, why doesn't Hillary Clinton hold Trump's feet to the fire and make a peace office a prominent part of the Democratic Platform? Why doesn't Barack Obama beat them to the punch and earn his Nobel Peace Prize by creating such a White House office while he's got the power to do so? Now's the time!

As you may know, the idea was first proposed by Benjamin Rush, one of the founding fathers, in 1793. You may not know that legislation proposing a Department of Peace was before Congress through much of the previous century. That history has been told by Frederick L. Schuman in Why a Department of Peace?, originally published by Another Mother for Peace in 1969. Mother’s efforts were complemented and amplified by the Peace Act Advisory Council (PAAC, which then became Council for a Department of Peace, CODEP). Sitting at her kitchen table with a manual typerwriter and smoking countless cigarettes, Mary Liebman wrote PAX, the group’s newsletter, between 1970 and 1976.

Working with Charlie Keil and with Becky Liebman, Mary’s daughter, I have compiled these and other documents into a pamphlet, We Need a Department of Peace: Everybody’s Business, Nobody’s Job. In the rest of this post I present section six, “Peace is Everybody’s Business, Nobody’s Job”(Mary’s mantra), from the pamphlet. All of the quoted passages are from the newsletters that Mary Liebman wrote.

Read more »

by Paul Braterman

Islam Evolving, Taner Edis, Prometheus Books, June 2016

This is an excellent review of an important but difficult subject, and a welcome change from the ill-informed bluster of a Sam Harris, or the limp apologetics of a Karen Armstrong. It is the work of an author who is exceptionally well placed to appreciate the context of the mass of information on which he draws. Lucidly written, it is also a work of broad scholarship (there are more than 500 references and footnotes), and provides an overview of one of the most important developments of our times. Overall, it is a much-needed corrective to the popular view that these times are particularly violent, and that the roots of this violence lie within Islam.

It is also a very disturbing book, and I mean that as a compliment. While fully committed to secular Enlightenment values, Edis recognises that this cannot be the starting position in any worthwhile discussion of committed Islam. Secularism is neither historically inevitable, nor a logical necessity, nor a moral imperative. In his native Turkey, for example, secularism was the founding principle of the modern State, but has lost out to an Islamic pious modernity, whose advocates cannot simply be dismissed as deluded or wicked. Secularism cannot claim to be the more democratic option, where it is not what people would prefer. The secular ideal of rule of an impartial law is not neutral, since it places judges, members of the power elite, as arbiters. Moreover, Edis turns a critical searchlight on the ostensively secular United States, where he now lives and works, finds echoes there of much of what concerns him about Islam today, and challenges the West's air of injured innocence in the face of violence. Ultimately, he regards Islam as a far smaller peril than a rampant neoliberalism that values individuals only as producers and consumers, sells political influence to the highest bidder, and still sponsors the denial of the world's most urgent problem, global warming. He shows how the rhetoric of the “war on terror” is used, in the West as in his native Turkey, to suppress dissent, and is contemptuous of how western defenders of freedom have accepted the facile and counterfactual narrative of an inherently violent Islam. Most disturbing of all, he critically examines his own Enlightenment assumptions, which his readers, and mine, will generally take for granted. For instance, why do we regard free speech as good? To what extent do our own institutions follow this ideal in practice? And should we not be more aware of the degree of coercion implicit in our own social order?

Read more »