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italynt · 5 years ago

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If you want a primer in regards to what’s going on in Italy, in terms of restarting the Serie A season, then here’s a good article to read.

Here’s an overview of everything that’s been going on from James Horncastle at The Athletic:

It’s now almost two months since Sassuolo striker Francesco Caputo celebrated his goal against Brescia by lifting up his jersey to reveal the message “Stay at Home” on a T-shirt underneath.

It feels like a long time ago, doesn’t it? So how close are we to football resuming in Serie A?

What is the situation in Italy now?

Last weekend, Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced the government is ready to begin the next phase of easing the country back to normality. Aspects of lockdown will be relaxed on May 4 allowing 4.5 million people to go back to work. Citizens will have freedom of movement within their own region. Restaurants and bars will be able to deliver takeaway. Exercise in parks and even a dip in the sea is permitted as long as social-distancing guidelines are respected. But the new decree has not escaped criticism. Opposition parties think the government is still being too cautious. Some regions like the Veneto are breaking ranks and lifting measures earlier than others. Bishops are protesting the ban on public masses and football feels it is being unfairly treated.

Why does football feel victimised?

Well, individual athletes like swimmers, cyclists and sprinters can return to training next Monday. Team sports will have to wait at least until May 18 and only if the protocol passes muster with the government’s scientific committee. This has sparked controversy because footballers cannot even train on their own or at a distance from each other within the controlled environment of a deep-cleaned training facility. What they can do is go for a jog or a workout in the local park — where members of the public may be inclined to approach them in breach of social distancing rules. “So we’ll have Ciro Immobile and Edin Dzeko in Villa Borghese and Lorenzo Insigne on the Caracciolo boardwalk,” scoffed Lazio owner Claudio Lotito.

It doesn’t make any sense. Many of the clubs are exasperated. The players’ union (AIC) said in a statement it was “perplexed and surprised” by a decision it considers “illogical” and “discriminatory”. Serie A stopped earlier than the other top five leagues. It has more fixtures to fulfil and stands to lose £620 million if the season isn’t brought to a close. La Repubblica quoted Napoli’s president Aurelio De Laurentiis saying: “COVID-19 will end up making the middle and smaller clubs who live beyond their means disappear.” It’s not hard to see why the league and the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) are pushing hard to at least prepare their teams for any return. “I do not want to be Italian football’s gravedigger,” said Gabriele Gravina, the president of the FIGC.

But as with everything in Italy it is deeply political and the pushback has been considerable. Italy’s highest-profile female athlete, the swimmer Federica Pellegrini, said: “All I hear about is football and I’m disappointed by that, other sports exist too”. Similarly, the president of the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) Giovanni Malago said: “Sport is not just and cannot only be Serie A football.”

The FIGC is an affiliate of CONI and football obtains more funding than any other sport. What Malago says matters. He believes football has muddled its response to the pandemic — “Gravina talks about July, August, September, October, even about splitting the league into two groups with play-offs and play-outs” — which further damages the game’s reputation. Ultimately, the decision lies with the government, but relations between the FIGC, Serie A and the minister of sport, Vincenzo Spadafora, have been tense.

Why are relations strained between Italy’s sporting bodies?

For a start, Spadafora hasn’t always toed the party line. In March, he sparked chaos at the Stadio Ennio Tardini, where Parma’s match at home to SPAL was due to go ahead in accordance with a government decree, which had been signed the night before. However, with players waiting in the tunnel, Spadafora announced the league needed to shut down with immediate effect. The game was delayed for an hour and 15 minutes while officials checked whether the order had been changed. It hadn’t and Parma-SPAL kicked off. “Instead of indulging in demagoguery, be consistent with the actions of your own government” came the reply from Serie A president Paolo Dal Pino.

It wasn’t pretty then and things aren’t any rosier now. Spadafora has called out club owners for using the media to influence opinion and force his hand. “We have to start safely,” he said on Tuesday. “Do you remember when the league didn’t want to stop? How many teams ended up in quarantine?” The answer is six. To avoid that happening again, the FIGC has drawn up a 47-page protocol document, seen by The Athletic, with the aim of protecting the players, coaches, referees and other members of staff from contagion.

How will they protect the players and everyone else?

The protocol document contains lots of advice from leaders in the medical field. In addition to the FIGC’s own 12-person scientific committee, the protocol has had substantial input from a task force comprising four experts in infectious diseases and virology. The protocol recommends squads should be selected three to four days before training resumes. The players and essential coaching staff in this group will then undergo an initial screening phase. This entails a visit to a clinic, a temperature check and an up-to-date medical history. Let’s pick a player at random. Say, Brescia’s Mario Balotelli: the FIGC wants to know if he’s travelled in the last two months and where to, whether or not he’s been in contact with anyone who has tested positive for the virus, and whether he’s showing any symptoms.

Depending on certain criteria, the group will be given two RT-PCR tests within 24 hours of each other and an antibody test. The expense and availability of testing — not to mention the morality of rolling them out for one category of society — remains a bone of contention. “The request on the players’ part is for football to resume only when every citizen can have a test,” Tommasi said. “There mustn’t be any fast-track for our industry.” As you might expect with a medical, there will be a resting ECG (to measure heart health), a spirometry (to measure breathing capacity), and blood and urine tests. The protocol is especially mindful of the latest medical advice on the damage left by COVID-19 and the therapies used to treat it on a person’s lungs and the heart. Even after screening is over, the group will have daily temperature checks and be constantly assessed for symptoms.

A permanent “ritiro” — a place for players and staff to live on-site — is also recommended. A number of clubs have dorms or even hotels adjoining their training grounds. When the Melia hotel closed in Milan as part of the lockdown measures, Christian Eriksen temporarily moved into Inter’s Appiano Gentile training ground. The problem is 11 of the 20 teams don’t have lodgings, so completely isolating the group isn’t possible across the board. However, the other nine clubs are meant to allocate players single, well-ventilated rooms where they will shower after their distancing-adapted training sessions.

Everyone in the group will be given behavioural guidelines to follow, ranging from washing hands to PPE for masseurs and physios. Treatment tables will be spaced out and time slots allocated to avoid congestion. If the enforcement of social distancing means there isn’t space in a team meeting, the preference is for a video conference instead. Food in the canteen will be self-service only.

As for training itself, the first week foresees individuals or small groups working out more than two metres apart before a gradual return to normality in week two and week three, with players running through patterns of play, set-pieces and playing small-sided games.

If someone does test positive, they are to be isolated immediately. Training will be suspended until the team and coaching staff receive the all-clear from two tests taken 24 hours apart and antibody tests will be repeated within five and seven days of each other. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the government’s scientific committee raised a red flag at this part of the protocol on the basis that, up until now, one positive test has been enough to send clubs into quarantine for a fortnight. This is a dilemma faced by all leagues hoping to finish the season.

Then there’s the not insignificant matter of away games and travel: it’s one thing limiting external contact within a training facility you own, it’s another thing doing it on the road. Fourteen of Serie A’s 20 clubs are located in areas that were defined “hotbeds” in Italy’s fight against the pandemic.

The outlook’s bleak then?

Gravina said: “In order to run zero risks, we’d have to wait for a vaccine. According to the scientists, that won’t be until spring 2021. We can’t just shut everything down waiting for that to happen.” Dialogue between the FIGC and the government’s scientific committee remains open, with Gravina vowing to modify the protocol in a renewed effort to at least obtain consent for teams to return to training on May 18.

Spadafora grows more pessimistic by the day, however. He talks about the road back to football getting tighter and tighter with only a “spiraglio” — the smallest of openings — left for it to happen. Gravina’s decision to align himself with UEFA and make August 3 the cut-off point for domestic competitions to finish puts Italian football on the clock. Serie A has proposed proroguing expiring contracts until after the season concludes. If the league returns to training in less than three weeks and games start from mid-June, that sounds like a good idea. But that’s a big if.

Spadafora has appealed to the leagues to come up with a Plan B. “I am starting to get the idea there will be a surprise over the next few days,” he told free-to-air TV channel La7. “Presidents could soon ask me to end the season now so they can prepare for the next one.” Brescia’s owner Massimo Cellino has repeatedly declared the season over. His counterparts at Torino and Sampdoria, Urbano Cairo and Massimo Ferrero, have both expressed scepticism plans to return — they fear finishing this season may compromise the next one.

What are the players doing in the meantime?

Well, Lazio’s Marco Parolo has been using his free time away from the training ground to protest that players should be allowed in the training ground. “All professional athletes should be treated the same,” he told the club’s official radio station. “I’m our athletes’ No 1 fan at the World Championships, and I’m all for them going back to training, but I think footballers should, too.”

For now though the players continue to work out at home.

“It’s difficult to expect a player to be able to maintain the necessary fitness to play in Serie A after a prolonged period of inactivity,” Sampdoria’s head of performance, Paolo Bertelli, tells The Athletic. “We’re trying to keep the fitness of our players to the highest standards as much as we possibly can.” Samp’s players have workout classes six days a week. “The sessions last between 65 and 80 minutes each depending on the player and the day of the week,” Bertelli says. “In addition to a warm-up, we do some free-weight exercises — some core, some jumps — hop on the exercise bike and work with the resistance bands. The players who have a running machine get a workout for that. It’s a bit different for the goalkeepers because we need to keep their explosiveness and strength.”

Roma’s goalkeeper Pau Lopez logs onto Roma’s bespoke platform to access all the material he needs for his day. “Every day the fitness coach sends us a customised workout plan that we have to follow to stay in shape,” the Spaniard tells The Athletic. “We weigh ourselves on a daily basis and send the info to the nutritionist. He keeps us posted, especially if there’s a problem. It’s all very well planned out.”

Manolo Zubiria, Roma’s chief global sporting officer, goes into more detail. “We set up a communication platform that allows the club’s directors and coaching staff to video conference with the players. It’s not just those in the first team either, but all levels, including our women’s team. Internal comms are fundamental. We want to give everyone as much support as possible in terms of info and assistance, whether it’s to do with fitness or nutrition. To that end, we are ensuring our players receive all the necessary material for home workouts. In terms of grocery shopping, we have also sorted a delivery service. We can’t predict what will happen in the coming weeks but our objective is for the lads to be in the best shape possible when training resumes.”

What’s the state of play in the table?

Juventus reclaimed top spot with their 2-0 win against Inter on March 8 and have a slender one-point lead over Lazio. Lotito is against the idea of play-offs to decide the top four — “Inter have eight points less than us (in third) and Atalanta have 14” — but he would be up for settling the title in a one-off game against the Old Lady, who, he points out, Lazio have already beaten on two occasions this season (in the league and the Super Cup). Atalanta occupy the last Champions League place and have a three-point advantage over Roma, plus a game in hand and a superior head-to-head record.

As for the Europa League, Milan are outside the top six but could still qualify through the Coppa Italia if they were to turn around a first-leg semi-final defeat to Juventus (without Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Theo Hernandez, who are suspended) and overcome either Inter or Napoli in the final. Down at the bottom, Brescia (10 points adrift of safety) and SPAL (seven) were already hanging by a thread, which is why, to some observers, it’d make sense for them to trade places with Crotone and Pippo Inzaghi’s Benevento, the two teams in the automatic promotion places in Serie B.

If that was the case, you’d have some sympathy for Inzaghi’s former Milan team-mate Alessandro Nesta. The former centre-back is now managing Frosinone, who were in second until the most recent round of fixtures, when Crotone took their spot.

But as one Serie A executive put it to The Athletic, if the season isn’t concluded on the pitch, there is “no right answer” to satisfy everyone’s definition of fairness.

#Long Post #Serie A #Serie A Femminile #Italy #Covid-19 #Scheduled

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rannadylin · 7 years ago

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Here continues the tale of two Awakened elves who just might be developing feelings for each other, along with my humble illustrations of the journey.

Pairing: Aloth Corfiser/Watcher Lenneth

Pillars of Eternity, sometime fairly soon after the confession on the bridge and the pistol scene

Word count: 1770

Rating: G

Now also on Ao3

Confidence: Scene the Third.

Grimoire management was a delicate business. The utmost concentration was essential, especially in the middle of a lively adventuring party’s camp. Thus, Aloth failed to notice the Watcher’s approach until she suddenly plopped down beside him as he was in the middle of imbuing one of his grimoire’s pages with the soul energy necessary to cast Chain Lightning, tracing out the intricate lines of the spell on the yellowed page. Startled out of his intense concentration, he uttered an invective he’d learned from Iselmyr. Lenneth uttered a startled giggle. Aloth sighed.

“All right,” he grumbled peevishly, “tell me what you want so I can get back to preparing for tomorrow. I’ll have to start this page over now.”

“Oh,” Lenneth said, her voice soft, brows knitting in concern as she saw, too late, what she’d interrupted. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”

“It’s all right,” Aloth sighed again, leaning back from the tome open on his lap and blinking away the eyestrain of such intense focus. “It’s hardly urgent; I have all evening,” he assured her, attempting to affect a polite and pleasant demeanor and not to think too much on her nearness or the warmth that seemed to radiate as if from her very soul in such proximity. He fancied that his grimoire, deprived suddenly of the energy he had been so carefully feeding it, tingled and shivered like iron filings about to leap to a magnet. “What can I do for you, Watcher?”

She eyed the tome for a moment longer before looking back to the wizard. “Do any of the special dishes you’re supposed to serve for the Feast of Feasts involve boar?”

Aloth blinked at her. Once. Twice, before he could find words, and even then it was just to echo, “Boar?”

“Because Hiravias just brought one back - only slightly mangled, but that’s what you get when you send a stelgaer out as your hunting party - and it seemed like a special occasion might be warranted, and it is the first week of Deep Summer, so I thought…” She finally trailed off and shrugged.

“I...haven’t celebrated the Feast of Feasts for years,” Aloth mused. “But yes, there is something involving a boar stuffed with small fowl on the fourth day.”

“Effigy’s eyes,” Lenneth swore. “It’s only Cönyngsdag. Don’t know that the boar would keep for two more days, even if we wanted to bother dragging it along on the road.”

“I should be very interested to see how you managed to cook such a dish on the road in the first place,” Aloth said, not trying very hard to suppress the smirk that arose at the thought of her doing just that. “Why do you want to do such a thing, anyway?”

“For fun?” she shrugged. “To raise morale? I don’t know, what’s the point of roasting a whole boar without making a special occasion of it?”

“I meant that it seems odd to celebrate an Aedyran holiday while you’re traveling through the Dyrwood with a company consisting of one whole Aedyran. Didn’t you say you were from Rauatai?”

“Once upon a time,” Lenneth admitted. “Haven’t been back in years. And my parents both came from other places before they lingered in Rauatai long enough to have kids, so wandering’s in my blood. Feels like I’m from a lot of places, these days.”

“Have your travels taken you as far as Aedyr, then?” he asked, his voice lowering a bit in a sudden fit of...shyness, or something like it he couldn’t quite name, at the thought of Lenneth in the land of his birth.

“Not yet,” she said with a brief glance his way, and a look about her that somehow seemed in concord with the nameless feeling that had come over him.

“How do you know of the Feast of Feasts, then?” Aloth pressed. “I didn’t think it was celebrated anywhere in this part of the world. Especially not in the Dyrwood, given its history with the fercönyng.”

“Unfortunately not, as far as I know,” she confirmed, producing a small, dog-eared book from a pocket somewhere. On its faded cover he could just make out the words Aedyre Customs. “Nicked it back in Defiance Bay,” she explained as he thumbed through the narrow pages. “It’s been good reading. It makes it all sound so...glamorous.”

Aloth snorted. “Then it takes serious liberties. And as a wizard, I’m obliged to remind you that the point of a glamour is to conceal the reality.”

“Oh, I know,” Lenneth grinned, amusement bubbling through her voice. “Never ran a con that didn’t call for a bit of glamour to do just that.” And she fluttered her eyelashes at him in a way that she probably meant only in jest at her former career, but its effect on him was more like she had cast some sort of gravity-twisting spell in the region of his stomach. Glamour, indeed. Feeling a moment’s sympathy with the targets of her past cons, Aloth fixed his eyes on his grimoire and caught his breath as she babbled on, “Anyway, maybe we’ll throw a proper Feast of Feasts when we’re back at Caed Nua. Or the last day or two of it, anyway. You’ll have to fill in the gaps for me on how to do it properly; the book’s so short it doesn’t go into much detail.” She nudged him with an elbow till he reluctantly glanced up, certain he felt her warmth of spirit reflected in his own face. She surely noticed the blushing, but mercifully only asked, “You don’t mind, do you? I know my curiosity is excessive at times, but you are our only expert on all things Aedyran. And magic. And the Leaden Key, about which I do have more questions…”

Aloth groaned at the mention of his former career. “If those are the options, then holiday traditions it is.”

“Splendid!” she smiled. Then she dropped her eyes, blushing a bit herself now as she added, “You’ll let me know, though, if I’m bothering you too much with questions? I don’t mean to annoy you.”

“You don’t,” he replied without hesitation. Annoy was certainly not the word for her effect on him, though he was doing his utmost not to consider too closely what else to call it. “Your curiosity is...it’s…” A welcome distraction. An endearing glimpse of your mind’s quirks. Refreshing in contrast to the two-faced civility of Aedyr. Confusing at times and never dull. But all he could come up with to actually say was, “...oddly...charming.”

Given the delighted and predatory smirk this brought to her face, that may have been the wrong thing to say. Or, he reflected, exactly the right thing, as she leaned closer and said, “Well, then. Can I charm you with another question?”

“Go on,” he said, already quite charmed.

She gestured to the grimoire, still open across his lap. “How does it work, your book?”

“My grimoire,” he corrected automatically, and she nodded with a look of eager inquiry in her eyes.

“Are the spells just too much to memorize, that they have to be written down?” she asked.

Aloth huffed. “Not at all. The words of power are simple enough. I don’t just read them from the grimoire; the spells themselves - the soul energy that powers them - are stored in the pages, contained and defined by the words and symbols, by how they’re arranged. The challenge is not in recalling phrases, but in coaxing that energy back out of the grimoire when I need it, in the form that I need. It must be stored just so; released just so - it takes years of study to master the precision required to cast from even the simplest grimoire, and it takes strength of will to bend it to your purpose, not to mention strength of arms to heft the thing.”

“Oh.” Lenneth frowned. “Sounds more complicated than I thought.”

“Everything’s more complicated than you think, when you start to look closer at it,” Aloth soothed.

“True,” she shrugged, still looking disappointed.

“Watcher,” he asked, appraising that look of disappointment and finding it unacceptable not to resolve it, if he could, “do you...Why did you ask about the grimoire?”

“Honestly,” she sighed, “I thought...I hoped maybe I could learn a bit of what you do. I mean, I’ve about got the hang of shooting a pistol, now, but what with sticking to the back of our group to make good use of it, I’ve got a far better view than I used to of my favorite wizard at work,” she elbowed him again, gently now that she had his full attention anyway, “and it’s...well. It’s a wonder to behold, Aloth.”

Stumbling over that favorite (and then chiding himself, you’re the only wizard here, it doesn’t count), it took him a moment to catch up and process her words. “You...want to learn to do magic?”

“It was a silly idea,” she shrugged, glancing away. “Don’t know where I’d put a grimoire, anyway, amongst all the knives and the pistol and everything. Or when there’d be time to learn something that takes years.”

“Years to master,” he reiterated, eyeing her thoughtfully. “But...to make a beginning…perhaps a few of the simpler spells...”

Her eyes were wide as she looked back to him. “You’re not serious.”

“Well, I can show you the basics, anyway. I don’t know if you could learn to cast in time to put it to use against Thaos, but you could certainly learn how it works. An awareness of the process would be of strategic value to you, at the very least, when you’re directing me in battle or facing mages among our opponents.”

She studied him for a moment. “You are...far more in favor of this than I’d have guessed.”

“Charmed by your curiosity, no doubt,” he smirked, winning her brightest giggle in response. He shifted the grimoire from his lap halfway to hers, so that they could both see as he flipped back to the first pages and traced a finger over the lines he’d penned there ages ago - the arcane phrases alongside diagrams like little sparkling stars. “Now this,” he began, “would complement your own skills well. Arkemyr’s Dazzling Lights - leave an enemy dazed, then slip into the shadows, as you so often do. To such great effect, I dare say.”

She traced a finger over the diagrams, following the path of Aloth’s own hand, then looked up at him with her smile wide and her eyes sparkling as if reflecting the spell itself. “Arkemyr’s Dazzling Lights,” she repeated slowly, savoring the words. “Sounds glamorous.”

#pillars of eternity #PoE fanfic #pillars of eternity fanfiction #aloth #aloth corfiser #watcher #watcher lenneth #lenneth #elves #fanfiction #ranna draws #from the desk of ranna

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indianarrative1 · 4 years ago

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A change.org petition against a French film Cuties, streaming on Netflix, has the signatures of over 600,000 people. It beseeches people to cancel their subscriptions to the streaming service on the grounds that the film sexualizes kids and normalizes child pornography.

“From Cuties to Big Mouth to other movies mocking religions and exploiting children, Netflix is no longer the family friendly streaming service I once believed it to be!” the petition says. There is another petition, with more than 350,000 signatories, seeking to remove Cuties from Netflix.

Two points need to be made here. First, this campaign is not against free speech, whose champion I am. In fact, I wrote a book, There Is No Such Thing As Hate Speech: A Case for Absolute Freedom of Expression (Bloomsbury, 2017).

Ban on pornography is moral policing, because the people involved are adults, and judging the actions of consenting adults is philosophically untenable and ethically unjustifiable. But child pornography is evil by any reckoning, for getting kids to do things which their bodies and minds are not prepared for.

The second, and more important, point pertains to the ideological tilt of Netflix—which is Left-leaning. Watching its series, Sacred Games, one couldn’t miss the Nehruvian dogma that puts Hindu nationalism and Islamic terror on the same moral footing. It was an egregious example of moral equivalence.

It needs to be mentioned here that, all over the world, the Left is about “mocking religions and exploiting children.” Leftists hate everything in its existing form, be it the economy, society, history, politics, art, culture, law, even religion. Their antipathy towards religion is well known, yet they came up with something called ‘liberation theology.’

They may not be theistic, but they certainly believe that they themselves are God; they want to shape the world in accordance with their discredited ideology. For them, ideology is supreme; everything and everybody else exists for its sake. So, they brainwash young and old alike.

New Left (or postmodern) theorists go a step further. The pink upsurge of 1968—when student and others rose against capitalism, consumerism, indeed everything Western as elitist and iniquitous—was a cultural revolution in more ways than one. Coinciding with a spurt in sexual permissiveness, the revolutionaries also questioned the traditional aversion for pedophilia. A question was asked in France, where the upsurge was in the extreme: wasn’t revulsion for sex with children a ‘bourgeois’ taboo?

Many prominent intellectuals tended to answer in the affirmative. This underlines a disturbing fact: bad ideas can have such a profound, prodigious, and overwhelming influence on men and women of heightened consciousness that their natural instincts get subdued. It is astonishing to know that in the 1970s there was a movement to legalize and normalize pedophilia in a country as philosophically sophisticated and culturally advanced as France.

Muriel Salmona, a psychiatrist and president of the Traumatic Memory and Victimology Association, told Marie Doezema of The Atlantic (March 10, 2018) that in that revolutionary era “pedophilia was considered a sexual orientation.” Obviously, it was not the hated hetero-normative orientation and, thus, acceptable. She said, “It was all part of a vision of freedom.”

There are medical reasons for age-of-consent laws, for children are not capable of making an informed choice; they are especially vulnerable to assenting to those who are in positions of authority and those who enjoy their (children’s) trust. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines child sexual abuse as “the involvement of a child in sexual activity that he or she does not fully comprehend, is unable to give informed consent to, or for which the child is not developmentally prepared and cannot give consent, or that violates the laws or social taboos of society.”

Even before the WHO and medical experts highlighted the importance of appropriate age for sex, pre-pubescent sex was not the norm in even the most backward societies. For instance, in India, where child marriages were quite widespread till a few decades ago, the consummation usually took place only after puberty, after a ritual called gauna.

Even as the incidence of child marriage was coming down in poor countries like India and modern ideas were spreading, in the 1970s something unspeakably ugly was raising its head in France, the native place of most postmodernists. The Guardian reported on February 24, 2001, “Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and the current French health and education ministers Bernard Kouchner and Jack Lang were among the signatories of petitions in the 1970s calling for pedophilia to be decriminalized, it emerged yesterday.”

It just not just support for pedophilia. “A number of extraordinary documents have surfaced in the wake of accusations of possible child sex abuse against the former student revolutionary Danny Cohn-Bendit that are forcing France’s intellectuals to confront the values of the May 1968 revolution and its aftermath.”

The petitions came in the wake of imprisonment of three men in 1977 for “non-violent sex offences” against children aged 12 and 13. “Three years in prison for caresses and kisses: enough is enough,” the petition signed by Kouchner and Lang said.

The one signed by, among others, Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, and such luminaries of postmodernism as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida. It said, “French law recognizes in 12- and 13-year-olds a capacity for discernment that it can judge and punish.” Therefore, “it should acknowledge the right of children and adolescents to have relations with whomever they choose” (emphasis added).

Cohn-Bendit, a communist and later a Member of European Parliament for the French Green party, wrote an article in 1975 about the “erotic” nature of his contacts with kids at an alternative kindergarten in Frankfurt. “Certain children opened the flies of my trousers and started to tickle me. I reacted differently each time, according to the circumstances … But when they insisted on it, I then caressed them.”

Later, Cohn-Bendit claimed that the passages “bear no relationship to reality” and the idea was “to shock the bourgeoisie.”

Then there was the author Tony Duvert who spent his life glorifying “the great adventure of pedophilia.” The “fascism of mothers” incensed him.

But the mainstream media and commentators, who regularly highlights pedophilia by Christian priests and slam the church for suppressing such uncomfortable facts, rarely discuss the New Left’s support—at least, at one point—for pedophilia. This is despite the fact that there is a crucial difference between the stances adopted by the church and postmodernists. While the Christian clergy can be accused of shielding their own, they never justified pedophilia on theological grounds; on the other hand, postmodernists provided philosophical arguments, however sophistical, to legitimize the sexual violation of children.

By failing to castigate the New Left for its excesses, liberals end up promoting postmodernists and their rotten concepts. As a result, the postmodernist agenda of blurring the distinction between adults and kids has got somewhat mainstreamed. An example is the new phenomenon of child drag queens. Much to the consternation of conservatives, children are also exposed to drag queens, who are generally associated with the LGBT movement, in a programme funded by taxpayer money. There was a big controversy in America last year when it was found that a drag queen was a convicted pedophile.

Even in India, keeping children away from sex is becoming an outdate idea. In the Amitabh Bachchan-starrer Cheeni Kum, a nine-year-old child is named sexy. Worse, nobody found that this odd or objectionable. Not even Bachchan, who is highly educated and hails from an illustrious family. Despite all his refinement, he didn’t it abnormal calling a nine-year-old sexy. Sexualized kids are a new normal.

In the West, as also in India—and on the net. Thanks to the puerility of public discourse in India. And to the complicity of Left-liberals.

#sunday

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mariabblackyr2 · 5 years ago

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Telling Stories - Lecture + Seminar Notes & Set Task

· Surrounded by stories – true stories – family events or fictional stories

· Tell stores via social media via status and ‘stories’ - sharing a narrative

· Texts that can hold narratives – novels, comics, films, photographs, paintings, illustration – broaden what text is poetry, Instagram, songs, music videos – visual image considered by text

We can each be seen as a narrate – memories construct who we are – broaden notion of text

· Plato talks about stories and folk tradition that holds culture meaning – narrative from visual image – everyone has a different narrative of the painting before us – competing narratives within image – narrative within colour, texture

· Story of a story

· Title guides you to a narrative with the imagery reinforcing that but also telling more stories

· Your level of semiotic understanding limits your understanding of the image

· Narrative changes with the age that is looking at it - each generation is reclaiming words to subvert their original meaning.

· What is the first story you remember being told?

“A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo-sapiens – second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day’s events to the vast incommunicable construct of psychopaths’ – Edward Reynolds Price – when nothing material remains we still have cultural stories and identities built by these stories.

· There’s a large pool of stories we like to retell such as Romeo and Juliet – this links that no idea is original – universal metaphors – passing messages down through the metaphors – themes such as love, hate and conflict

· Each version applies to the new generation of the time – not just about culture

· Narrative is a document of it times

·Retold is different ways reach’s different audiences – becomes relevant to the year, the generation and what’s happening around us in the world

· Same old story – The taming of the Shrew vs 10 things I hate about you – same stereotypes apply in both stories

·Disney Princess reflective of the times – change in female character in current years – reflects cultural narratives

Cultural stories – help a community structure and assign meaning to history and their existences – include creation stories – community origins and fables which help teach moral values and ethical behaviour. Can help a community reinforce social norms and strengthen identity.

· ‘End of the World’ – types of stories we engage in – disaster films – global north – good vs bad – plays on climate change and the fear the goes along with – biblical repetition

Cultural stories – old folk tale – Juha and his donkey appear in many forms – adapted from an older oral tradition – inspired other stories – central to Arabic story telling culture – gulf region – donkeys still in pop culture

What’s the difference between ‘story’ and ‘narrative’ = story is a sequence of events (plot) – Narrative is the way those events are put together to be presented to an audience. – politics and moral value

· Royal Family – all the same story – narrative different in different sources such as newspapers – depends on the newspaper’s values

‘Narrative Theory starts from the assumption that narrative is a basic human strategy for coming to terms with fundamental element’s of our experience’ – how ‘narrative is different from other types of discourse’- ‘how stories help people make sense of the world, whilst also studying how people make sense of stories’

Matt Madden, 99 ways to tell a story – narrative changes in each comic – told in several images’ vs told in a one frame – same events, same story but a new narrative due to the construction of the story e.g. the way the story was put together not just the story itself.

Meaning in the colour – different representation

Narrative hard to pin down within work – so bland and boring – directly relatable – mundane experiences – plays with language within narrative making it obscure

· Narrative of the image Dorothea Lange – ‘The Migrant Mother’ – elements missed within the frame such as the women having more children, she has also been posed – the narrative was created by Lange but it is not really telling the truth of this woman – created as an image for the great depression

The picture of revellers in Manchester – viral sensation due to it resembling a painting

· The Fibonacci sequence – Renaissance artists would use the ratio with the visual ad of the Fibonacci spiral which is created by drawing circular arcs connecting the opposite corners of squares in the golden rectangle.

· Narrative in digital age – due to screens narrative cannot be read like looking at a person and hearing their voice – how is a tone created in social media – can be done visually but also done with text and emojis

· Accidental storytelling – the tone of a narrative can be lost – digital debate is often tone deaf

· Narrating debate – done by ‘upper class gentleman’ – juxtapositions

· Narratives in different forms – in our society there our multiple belief patterns and different types of narratives which are for the majority suppressed. The dominant classes have created the norm, a standard that is passed off as natural. This standard is reinforced by institutions such as schools and the church. Subjugated narratives have been continually produced as a response to dominant ideology. – form of protest

· Outsider art - something that’s not conventional

· Art Therapy is a form of outsider art – didn’t attend art uni – is it really outside art?

· ‘The Palestinian Trail of Fish: Artist’s Graffiti dives into heart of refugee struggle’ – response to the bad that is happening around the artists – controversial to make – not following the norm that has been created – comment of immigrants being fish out of water

· “My tattoos, or, rather, my single narrative tattoo, essentially charts the Eastward migration of Buddhism from its Hindu sources in India through its multiple manifestations / incarnations / influences in Tibet, Myanmar, Thailand, Indochina, China, and, finally Japan. Not unlike Shakespeare’s Parolles, from the ironically (at least from Parolles’ point of view) titled All’s Well that Ends Well, before I put my once-discrete tattoos into dialogue, into the development of classical narrative arcing, I was a “man of shreds and patches.” A tattoo here, a tattoo there. I found my nine scattered tattoos aesthetically unsightly. So over an 18-year period I worked (with the help of tattooists from Canada, Thailand, Colombia, India, Israel, Vietnam, and Hong Kong) on establishing an interconnected narrative. A story. But a postmodern story: one that includes, among other things, fragmentation, flashback, back story, interruption, and openendedness. There’s no single reading of my story of Buddhist passage.” – Jason S Polley

Prison tattoos – narrative of their life’s being told – symbols – more semiotics than narrative? – all tattoos follow a narrative – all part of what has made you up – your life narratives – an example of subjugated narratives

· Everything read as a text – shapes career and outlook

· Graffiti a example of a subjugated narrative – narratives found on built environment - subversive power

· The storyteller Walter Benjamin –

· The nesting place of the storyteller, Walter Benjamin pointed out, are in the loom shed and at the spinning wheel, in the fulling barn and the kitchen when doing tedious tasks - shelling peas in readiness for storing, sorting pulses for bagging, bottling and preserving. Stories were told to alleviate harsh labour and endless drudgery - and they were passed between generations - by the voice of experience, filled with the laughter of defiance, and the hope of just deserts.

· Creating narrative: exploring how makers and designers are using objects and making to tell stories – never used for food and drink but used for narrative

· Narrative fashion – everyone tells stories – fashion designers and brands use narratives to become a storyteller ‘ the expert of storytelling and apparel comes alive’ – the blouse has been passed down from generation to generation – narrative presents itself in clothing

· Creating narrative: exploring how makers and designers are using objects and making to tell stories – never used for food and drink but used for narrative

· Capturing a type of narrative through the aesthetic of craft by semiotics – narratives implied by signs

Set Task:

For this set task I choose to look at staged narrative. This idea came from everyones opinion of the migrant mother photography in the lecture. When asked what they thought they saw her as the mother of America, hard working, etc but no one even the lecturer mentioned that to achieve this photograph many were taken and the end product was staged by the photographer. Alongside the migrant mother I chose to look at the boy with grenade too which follows the same concept.

Dorothea Lange - Migrant Mother

The women is just a subject, ‘an appropriate symbol’ created by Lange

The symbol of the mother is created by the lack of the father figure, two small children holding onto her, the mothers gazing off past the camera - conjures emotions such as empathy but also admiring the mother at the time would of been a symbol of hope

Photograph taken for the FSA a government run project

One of the most reproduced images in history

Lange took a number of photographs of the mother and her family

There's a missing thumb - Lange had a retoucher remove the womens thumb

Constructed narrative - how authentic is the story/narrative in the image

Raises the question what stories are true and what are not?

Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park - Diane Arbus

Seminar:

Part one

The colour of pomegranates - is a less literal sense - reveals poets life visually and poetically - little dialogue

Art that tells a story, art that is inspired by a story, art that is composed by existing stories, art that invents a whole new story opposed to a narrative

Artists who explore stories

Susan Hiller, Monument - 41 photographs of memorial plaques, reenactment of how the work is seen - headphones on bench, voice plays through them

Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, 1999 - combined banks of the thames - collected hundreds of fragments of history and tokens of life - objects create inner monologue - explores time

Doris Salcedo - Unland -The orphans tunic 1997 - address seems of loss and bereavement - period of three years spoke to children who had witnessed the murder of their parents, how individuals experiences can be conveyed by others - physical distortion that happens within work - distortion of life that happens when you lose someone

Part two - Anti-Narrative

Desperate need to make stories to make meaning from life - what do we do with anti narrative - when every-things been flipped on its head

Paul Auster - a novel without a lot of detail where the man is - what questions begin to formulate from it? Leaves room for interpretation

Exercise in frustration - full of paradox due to its ambiguity

Without truth are we lost?

Definition - AntiNarrative - methods that challenge the traditional concepts of storytelling - breaks conventions and creates more question than it provides answers

Storytelling and order - need narrative structure for world to make sense

Postmodernism tolerant of ambiguity, style free work, playful work without doubt, allowed to ask a question without knowing the answers - Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

Contemporary methods of experimentation - blending of boundaries, practitioners rather question that get a clear cut answer

A conversation with the viewer

Subverting todorov - subverting the straight forward narrative structure of equilibrium, disruption and disequilibrium , an attempt to fix it, the new equilibrium

Part Three

Harvard Referencing and Paperpile

Google scholar

Little green arrow on P means it can reference

Have to format from blue hyperlinks

Create reference list from paperpile

Add books onto digital system

Part Four

Planning an Essay

Arrive at an academic opinion

Structure

Introduction( what, why and how?) - what: explain the question, key issues and ideas - Why: why is it important, think of broader context , how does it relate personally - How: how are you going to go about answering the question?

Main Body - setting out evidence , critical framework, two or three key texts, underpinning essay, summarise, analyse and evaluate - could also be comparing two different artists

Conclusion - should set out academic conclusions based on evidence supplied in essay, no new evidence, readdress the questions and explain clearly how they have been addressed and answer within the essay, refer back to introduction and main body of writing

links:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/lens/dorothea-lange-migrant-mother.html

Photography:

A Critical Introduction

Third Edition

Edited by Liz Wells

#contextualstudies

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brotherbo · 7 years ago

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Susya

“Who is willing to do shmira in Susiya tomorrow night?”

“What does that mean?”

What I was really asking is what does that mean: politically, intellectually, emotionally, actively, and passively.

I think I’ve been conditioned to feel a certain level of discomfort when I think about doing anything to “help the Palestinians.” I’m all into intellectual discourse and dialogue but don’t consider myself much of an activist, but here was an opportunity to experience what it’s like to actually engage with this discomfort knocking on my door. I wasn’t going to turn it down.

The basis for what’s going on is that there are seven demolition orders ready to be carried out, out of many more that have been already filed. Some of the structures are people’s houses, others bathrooms, and storage. The land has a complicated history and many narratives, (as most things do in this country) and I was ready to be informed on the way. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susya) was the resource of choice and I think it provides what seems like a reasonably fair portrayal of what I’ve seen in multiple sources leaning either way. In short, there was a Palestinian village, now there is a settlement, and a couple of Palestinians.

When I heard that it was organized by All That’s Left -- the same organization that took me on a tour of East Jerusalem just weeks earlier I was disappointed. I thought the tour to be somewhat interesting but generally felt an aura of amateurism in the way it was run, I don’t think, however, that they themselves would describe themselves as experts. I was more scared that it would just continue the general negative vibes that I’ve felt in “lefty” spaces of “holier-than-thou” speech from one member of the group to the next. What I would colloquially call “comparing sizes.” It wasn’t void of either.

The four shana bet Americans and Eliot drove down to Jerusalem to meet up with the rest of the activists in the parking lot of Gan Hapa’amon before driving down together to Susya. There were around 14 of us. Canada, America, now Israel, and one French woman. Our task, as per request of the residents of Susya was not to interfere with the demolitions but rather to act as a sort of safety measurement, in order that the IDF recognize that they’re dealing with more than just what they’ve been raised to see as “the enemy.” The organizers were especially interested in capturing footage of what might happen to these people for multiple reasons: to bring to court against certain unjustified action, to publicize the sheer horror of what it is to have something so dear as a home to be torn away from you and crushed to pieces in front of your own eyes, to victimize.

I must say I specifically felt a level of uncomfort with the act of filming for publicization. It seemed like more of a morally ambiguous question to me: Am I taking part in the misportrayal of someone who is simply carrying out their job? Only a few months ago I heard from one of my best friends from birth that he and his unit was stationed in Susya, assumingly, not to protect the Palestinian citizens though. There were naturally murmurings among us -- what would an encounter with one of our friends from yeshiva be like under these conditions? We collectively knew more than enough people for reasonable doubt to exist.

When we arrived we were greeted with a warm fire and steaming hot sweet chai tea, as is a common gesture of hospitality in the Arab world. We sat around the fire and heard a bit of the story of Susya and those who had lived their from Nasser, the de facto mayor of Susya. We talked about what the game plan would be if the bulldozers came in the morning. There was reasonable thought that the demolitions would happen sometime this week, which is specifically why there have been people coming out to guard every night.

They didn’t.

We went to sleep to wake at six in the morning ready for whatever was headed our way. We briefed again. Ate a deliciously classic Middle Eastern breakfast with fresh pitot cooked by the wives of the villagers, and took a lap to see where our would be positions were. We made it full circle and it was already late in the morning, it didn’t seem like anything would happen today. A couple of us davened and then we all sat in a circle clinging to our cups of tea and coffee, before we would make our way out back to the obligations of daily life. The obligations of my daily life, after I had hardly lived that of another for a transient moment.

I had an experience, one of hearing, sight, and thought. I did not feel, because I did not have to. So what did I experience? Only that of privilege and chance which allowed me to walk away with a satiated appetite and a roof to sleep under. Even that of blindness, the very same type that passes in the blink of an eye.

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avanneman · 7 years ago

Text

A World of Struggle at Harvard Law

(Author’s Note: The following is a sprawling takedown of David Kennedy’s A World of Struggle*, a book that clearly got my goat.)*

Pankaj Mishra is the author of several fascinating books, including From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and his new one Age of Anger, which I am struggling to get around to reviewing, if only Donald Trump would stop fucking up so much. Recently—well, less than a year ago—Mishra had this to say about Harvard Law Professor David Kennedy’s new book, A World of Struggle: How Power, Law, and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy: “Describes our world more accurately than any book I have read this year. Kennedy offers no clear prescriptions. Yet he clarifies that understanding how this world of injustice and inequality came about is the essential first step toward a democratic alternative.”

Naturally, I tracked Dave’s book down, but after downloading sample pages from Amazon and working my way through Dave’s white shoe1 prose, I’m afraid I began to gag, and more than a little. Dave, I felt, needed to be, well, cut down to size. But reading an entire book of Dave’s astringent ironies, which all rang just a little too self-congratulatory for my taste, struck me as going above and beyond the call of duty. I bought his book but decided to ease my burden by reading an extensive review of “Struggle” by Samuel Moyn, professor of history and law at Harvard, “Knowledge and Politics in International Law”, published in (of course) the Harvard Law Review, to use as a sort of study guide, allowing me to skip, rather than plow, through Dave’s book, allowing me to come up with some astringent ironies of my own without too much work. But I found that I disliked Dr. Kennedy’s book so much that I couldn’t, in good conscience, express my dislike unless I was sure I knew what I was talking about, so I stopped skipping and started plowing, and the more I plowed the more I decided that I didn’t much agree with either Harvardian, to the extent that I ended up discarding my Cicero and completing the journey alone.

But Dr. Moyn’s review is still “interesting” (interesting and depressing) in that it demonstrates how seriously Dr. Kennedy’s dreary “ideas” are taken in the highest circles (for what could be higher than Harvard?): “In his new book on how the world is ruled today through expert knowledge, Professor David Kennedy enters this continuing discussion [initiated by Francis Bacon, Professor Moyn tells us, and pursued by the likes of Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu2, and, most recently, Foucault] in brilliant, pathbreaking, and trademark fashion. Slyly presenting himself as a disinterested observer of global governance, Kennedy eclectically draws on twentieth-century perspectives about knowledge, achieving a synthesis all his own. Presented without theoretical encumbrance or jargon, A World of Struggle is a straightforward but sophisticated account that capitalizes on prior insight to achieve a unique and powerful vantage point. The superlative book wins its distinction not only because it constructs a novel theory but also because it applies that theory to how the globe as a whole is ruled — something no one in the canon of social theory has really done.”

I disagree entirely, but why not let poor Professor Kennedy speak for himself? Here’s a sample:

“In a world where so much is open to debate and conflict is all around us, how can it be so difficult to contest and change the things that matter? Things like the distribution of wealth or honor and shame. Or the pattern of environmental destruction. Or the ubiquity of kleptocratic rule. The answer is not a mysterious constitutional settlement, the obscure workings of a disaggregated public hand or global value consensus. The answer lies in the strange alchemy of expertise and struggle through which our world is made and remade. The alchemy is strange because struggle and conflict have seemed inimical to expertise: matters of political difference and clashing interests that experts aim to calm, mediate, and replace by sweet reason. The world experts know is more constituted order than distributional struggle, their expertise a way of knowing what to do rather than struggling about who will win. And yet, as the world has come to be managed in the language and practice of technical expertise, expert knowledge has itself been transformed. Adopted in crude vulgate by laymen and statesmen alike, expertise has become embroiled in struggle and come unhitched from the promise of decisive clarity, the usefulness of its indeterminacy more appreciated than its analytic rigor. In our world, indeterminate language and uncertain knowledge distribute wealth and power. That is strange—and hard to render visible, let alone contest.”

Let’s unpack the first few sentences. “In a world where so much is open to debate and conflict is all around us, how can it be so difficult to contest and change the things that matter? Things like the distribution of wealth or honor and shame. Or the pattern of environmental destruction. Or the ubiquity of kleptocratic rule.” Well, my unpacking is this: Are you kidding me? In a world of 7.5+ billion people, a world “where so much is open to debate and conflict is all around us”, how could it be possible to reach the slightest agreement on what the “things that matter” are, much less how to change them to suit everyone’s satisfaction? Do the people of the United States see eye to eye with the people of Nigeria on the “distribution of wealth”? Do Americans themselves see eye to eye on this matter? And what about the rest of the world? The Muslim “world”? (There are, surely, a dozen or more.) Or China? Or India? Or Africa? Or Latin America? Or even little Europe? Do the Germans and Greeks agree?

As for the “distribution of honor and shame”, include me out on that one. Who wants a UN on steroids (virtuous ones, to be sure)—which seems to be Dr. Kennedy’s “vision”—handing out “honor” and “shame”? Particularly the latter, since somehow I feel I might be on the receiving end of that one. It’s extraordinary to me that Dr. Kennedy can presume, with a straight face, that there is a near-universal consensus of what the world ought to be like—a laid-back, copacetic earthly Nirvana of income equality, renewable energy, and (presumably) transgender-friendly bathroom facility accessibility— in other words, the entire compendium of Harvard Faculty Lounge clichés made flesh—a consensus thwarted only by “the strange alchemy of expertise and struggle through which our world is made and remade.”

Well, what is this “strange alchemy” of which Dr. Kennedy speaks? Unsurprisingly, it is an alchemy of words. Experts claim to work to calm, mediate, and replace by sweet reason matters of political difference and clashing interests, but in fact they create ab initio a “winner deals and dealer wins” system that requires that their hands, and their hands alone, be always placed on the levers of power. We think we live in the “real world,” one defined and governed by ineluctable3 rules. But these “rules” are far from ineluctable. They are, in fact, artifice through and through, and malevolent artifice at that. Which is why all the things that we “all” want never get done, and why no one is ever held accountable for our endless disappointment.

Kennedy’s “arguments”, if they can be called that, are stunningly qualitative. Data are beneath him. To his mind, to state a thesis is to prove it, though all of his arguments ultimately depend on a single axiom, that all human beings are inherently and entirely selfish and all their actions can be derived from that fact. “Everyone wants something,” as the neo-Machiavellian Eleanor Roosevelt once put it.4

As Dr. Moyn explains, in Kennedy’s eyes even the “losers” are willing participants in the game:

“From benevolent Christians to human rights activists, groups have long known that the struggle to dominate is so deeply the way of the world that they would rather embrace the role of victims or minister to the defeated, choosing morality over victory. Even if they rarely change or even hope to change the outcome of cyclical engagement, such figures can at least claim not to have caused it. But ingeniously, Kennedy supposes that “losers” hardly portend some full-scale alternative to a world of struggle (as Jesus Christ and his followers have often prayed). For today’s losers by choice develop their own forms of expertise, Kennedy says, to justify and advance their roles in the world. Perhaps the righteous will reap rewards in the next life, or the meek will inherit the earth someday. But the real point is strategizing in this world. No one, it seems, is above the will to power.”

In his zeal to “prove” (that is, to argue) that images, rather than reality rule men’s minds, Dr. Kennedy has a confusing tendency to stumble over his own two feet. The notion of “one world”, which gives cover to the cold-blooded Wille zur Macht of the pseudo-dispassionate expert class who would rule us all, springs largely, according to Dr. Kennedy, from a photograph, the famous “Big Blue Marble” photograph of the earth taken from the moon by the first astronauts:

“Forty years ago it was common to say that the most meaningful product of the space race was a distant photo of planet earth. Environmentalists, world federalists, pacifists, and cosmopolitan humanists of all kinds latched onto the image as evidence of a deep truth; ours is one world, we are one humanity, planet earth is our only home. This idea was not yet hegemonic among the world’s political, commercial, and cultural elites: the photo pushed things along. Without a space program, without a Cold War, without a Life magazine, we might have not have had those photos at that moment in that way, and the idea may have arisen differently, at a different moment, or have seemed less suggestive or compelling.”

“Forty years ago it was common to say that the most meaningful product of the space race was a distant photo of planet earth.” Was it actually “common” to say this? How could it be ascertained that it was “common" to say this? And even if it were “common”, how does that prove that the “Big Blue Marble” photo really was “the most meaningful product of the space race”? Or does the value of Dr. Kennedy's claim lie more in its charm and wit than any objective correlation to fact? To a very large extent, Dr. Kennedy’s book is simply a string of assertions that are held to be true because he says they are true.

Furthermore, consider the substance of what the professor just said. Is he arguing that “the pattern of environmental destruction”—a “truth” that he regards as self-evident and returns to over and over again—doesn’t really exist but is rather simply a construct, something that we worry about because someone took a picture that various “elites” were able to use to further their own hidden hegemonic ends at our expense rather than our interests? Because for the most of the book he argues in precisely the opposite direction, constantly accusing the “experts” of deliberately undermining all efforts to meaningfully address this “pattern of environmental destruction”, citing this pattern as the ultimate proof of their ultimate perfidy.

Later, he compares the “Big Blue Marble” with an earlier “One World” construct that he explicitly states was used to justify a policy of ruthless hegemonic oppression, “a tragic, historical example,” springing from “the teachings of Francisco de Vitoria, a Spanish theologian and jurist of the early sixteenth century.5 His writings were the space photo of the day, urging a conception of global humanity that included the newly discovered peoples of the new world. They were also human, he reasoned, cultivating land and organizing themselves in political communities, and were bound alongside Europeans by universal natural law. They had obligations as well as rights, including the duties of welcome and hospitality for friendly commerce and obligations to hear the gospel. When they violated these obligations or heard the gospel clearly but failed to convert, the Spanish were empowered, as arms of the universal law, to discipline and conquer them by force.”

But in fact the conquistadors had done much of their work before Vitoria started lecturing on the subject in the mid-1530s,6 and, very much to the point, and very much neglected by Dave, is the horror with which Vitoria regarded the conquistadors’ handiwork in the Americas:

“In truth . . . [the Indians] are men, and our neighbors . . . [.] I cannot see how to excuse these conquistadors of utter impiety and tyranny; nor can I see what great service they do to His Majesty by ruining his vassals. Even if I badly wanted the archbishopric of Toledo which is just now vacant and they offered it to me on condition that I signed or swore to the innocence of these Peruvian adventurers, I would certainly not dare do so. Sooner my tongue and hand wither than say or write a thing so inhuman, so alien to all Christian feeling!”7

Furthermore, the Protestant nations conducted their imperialist expansion with rather less religious pretense, the Dutch notably slaughtering everyone who got in their way, Spanish or “native”, and certainly without any regard for issues relating to the “gospel”.8 This was true of the British as well, and it was only after the Brits got their empire well in hand, after the Seven Years War, leaving them masters of both North America and India (pretty much) that the notion that they were spreading “civilization” around the globe came to be used, far more as a justification for what they had done than as a pretext for what they intended to do.

After the Napoleonic wars, when Europeans finally decided that fighting each other was a bad idea, the notion of spreading civilization via conquest did become something of an obsession, gathering momentum as the century approached its close, when it did become an obsession, because (it was assumed) that was how the Brits got rich. But there were always those who could penetrate the mask, including the Edwardian man of letters Hilaire Belloc, who defined the superiority of Western civilization in a succinct couplet: “For we have got the Maxim gun and they have not.”9

Kennedy’s point is that international lawyers today (he naturally chooses his own profession as the exemplar of expert evil) are no different than Francisco de Vitoria—they provide a pious mask both to cover and enable the raw appetites for gain that in fact both drive and oppress the world. He claims that modern international lawyers resemble their Spanish forebear more than they know, for they too are members of a church, though (fortunately) they have cast off the chains of both poverty and celibacy.

Kennedy has had considerable experience working on international trade agreements, and one of his objectives in his long discussion of international trade is to "disprove" the traditional liberal argument that free trade benefits all participants with the old mercantilist argument (though he, of course doesn't call it that) that the wealth of nations is, like everything else in life, the product of a struggle--that is to say, the product of a successful struggle of winning rather than losing.

"If you leave law out of the picture, it is easy to underestimate the potential to rearrange access to rent. Many economists speak about the strategic imperative for companies—and countries—to enter and hold “high-value” segments of the global production process. It is common to think of a ladder running naturally from natural resource exploitation through processing to assembly, manufacturing, design, branding, and invention. It seems a rule of thumb that high-wage “innovation” or “knowledge-based” activities will offer opportunities to retain a greater portion of the overall gain from economic activity in the value chain than low-skill manufacturing. Law is an important tool for encouraging people to move up the ladder.

"But it is also important to understand how much this hierarchy of value itself depends on legal arrangements. A shift in intellectual property law and labor law, for example, might sharply diminish the exclusivity of innovation-based activities and reduce the availability of the privilege to access low-wage labor. At the margin, regulatory shifts in the many rules governing access to returns from different activities in global value chain can alter what is and is not a “high-value” activity. It is no wonder, therefore, that we also see intense struggle over those rules, undertaken in an extremely unruly and disparate fashion, among producers, consumer groups, investors, firms, cities, and nations."

In the first paragraph, Kennedy uses the word "rent"10 in a confused manner. Sometimes, it simply means "a substantial profit" (from, e.g., "high-value" production) and sometimes it means "rent" in the technical economic sense of "rent-seeking" (an "unfair" profit obtained by some manner of guile or coercion rather than the operation of the free market). His real point is to argue that all the paraphernalia of "free trade"—all the agreements, negotiations, settlements, arbitrations, etc.—are simply masks for self-seeking rent-seeking. The fact that the facts refute him doesn't concern Professor Kennedy, because facts do not concern him.

During the Reagan Administration, Kennedy worked on trade negotiations with the Japanese. Drawing on this experience, he labors to explain how struggles for "naked" advantage are clothed with chaste, "objective", reality-defining terminology that both disguises what is really going on and precludes the consideration of alternatives that might help "the people," who, in Kennedy's world, are always being screwed—because, as he says at one point, "it's rents all the way down": all economic relationships are essentially carnivorous. But in his discussions of all this high-end wickedness, Kennedy is careful to keep his discussion highly abstract, often stating issues in the hypothetical, and often in the alternative, so that, conveniently enough, he's never wrong, or, at least, never provably so:

"The outcome of arguments tethered, however loosely, to national interests and ideological positions also distributes power among those interests and positions. The persuasive power or legitimation effect of Japanese and American demands in future struggles was affected by their relative success in the Structural Impediments Initiative. While the initiative was under way, people were assessing—and reassessing—the relative “power” of American and Japan. Was Japan’s spectacular success in penetrating American markets—and America’s dismal record in reverse—a sign of American decline? Or had Japan been cheating, burdening its economy with government interference for short-term gains in ways that set the stage for a future decline or postponed an inevitable reckoning with American manufacturing prowess?"

Well, I don't know, professor. Why don't you tell me? Why don't you explain to me, if international trade is simply a struggle for power, why the Carter and Reagan Administrations presided over the collapse of the American steel industry and the American consumer electronics industry, along with substantial reductions in the American consumer appliance industry and the American automobile industry, all of which could have been avoided, in the short run, by the application of tariffs? Perhaps the whole notion of Ricardan comparative advantage (which, to the extent that Kennedy understands it, he rejects) was taken seriously in America? Perhaps it even worked in the real world! American "decline" was certainly a matter of intense concern, during the second half of the Reagan Administration especially, but the subsequent reversal of fortunes between Japan and the U.S. had nothing to do with "American manufacturing prowess,"11 but rather the remarkable explosion of the American computer industry, which caught Japan flat-footed and has gone on to reshape the world's economy, with remarkably little participation of the Japanese, with the single exception of the Sony PlayStation.

In addition to his own experiences, Kennedy draws on other scholars’ theories to supplement his picture of a dog eat dog world—for example, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal’s notion of the “oppressor state”: “many aspects of the legal order function as a Myrdalian ‘oppressor state’,12” he tells us. “Global political and economic winners are given extraordinary powers: the UN Security Council veto for World War II victors is the most visible, but weighted voting arrangements across the international institutional system distribute rule-making power in ways that consolidate the capabilities of the center. The relative powers of creditor and debtor nations in international financial institutions is a striking example. Legal arrangements also affect the tendency of Myrdal’s forces of ‘migration, capital movements and trade’ to impoverish poorer regions.”

The only problem with this analysis is that it isn’t true. If the “Big Five” UN Security Council members were placed in such a privileged position, how is it that the ultimate “losers” of World War II—Germany and Japan, bombed into submission in the greatest display of destructive power even seen, surpassed the economies of two of their conquerors—France and Great Britain—in a matter of decades, while another of the Big Five, the Soviet Union, ultimately fell to pieces?

Unsurprisingly, because it utterly contradicts his thesis, Dr. Kennedy says nothing about the enormous growth in wealth among the developing nations over the last 30 years. This chart, using data from the International Monetary Fund, shows that, as of 2015, the great nations of China and India, most of the nations of Africa, and many of the nations of South America and Asia were enjoying economic growth rates significantly greater than that of the U.S. The increase in inequality within nations—the U.S, in particular—is of great concern. But the picture Dr. Kennedy tries to paint of pseudo-dispassionate experts contriving to despoil the weak for the profit of the strong is entirely false, or, more precisely, more than half a century out of date.

In his eagerness to expose Western covetousness, Dr. Kennedy tells us the following: "Nor is it surprising that as the leading economies negotiated over lower tariffs among themselves on manufactured goods in the context of the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade, trade in textiles continued to be covered by a different and more restrictive legal arrangement, the Multi-Fiber Arrangement."

All this is true, but Dr. Kennedy might have told us that 1) the MFA imposed zero tariffs on the very poorest countries and that 2) it expired in 2005. Textile tariffs haven't been eliminated, but in 2014, textile export figures, according to Wikipedia, showed the following: China, $274 billion; India , $40 billion; Italy, $35 billion; Germany, $35 billion; Bangladesh, $28 billion; and Pakistan, $27 billion.

Dr. Kennedy's view of the operation of the world economy is similar to Donald Trump's: both see the world economy in zero-sum, mercantilist terms. The only way for one nation to get richer is for another to get poorer. There is only so much wealth in the world, and the only way of getting is taking.

Both views are equally false, of course, but both are given traction by the manifest failure of neoliberalism to guarantee a constantly expanding economy throughout the world. The notion of a self-policing economy proved sadly naive. The first Industrial Revolution brought massive political and economic instability to the West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and non-Western nations are experiencing similar unpleasant growth pangs today. Meanwhile, the West is dealing, not too well, with the loss of its guaranteed economic preeminence, along with the impact of the "Second" (or Third or Fourth or Fifth) Industrial Revolution. The "Happy Time", stretching roughly from 1945 to 1973, when economic progress was constant, with the rewards spread relatively across all income levels, seems likely to have been an exception to the rule rather than the “new normal”.

And, indeed, our “experts”, whom I so largely defend, do have much to answer for. The euro was a terrible idea, as Paul Krugman explains here. But it wasn’t “invented” as a way for “oppressor nations” to exploit the weak. Instead, European “elites”—a word I’m quite willing to use when it fits—were blinded by the fantasy of returning to La Belle Époque before World War I, when Europe was the center of world civilization. As Krugman (again) argues, in a column written just prior to the “Brexit” vote in the UK, European experts have continued to serve Europe badly, but it’s largely a case of being unable to admit that policies that “worked” in times of prosperity don’t necessarily work in times of hardship.13

Economics is the study of acquisitiveness and acknowledges, when it does not exalt, human selfishness. Dr. Kennedy takes up the example of international human rights law—of great concern particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to offer a far more tangible possibility of a “world of law” than had ever been glimpsed before—to “prove” that even those lawyers who deliberately set out to tame the blind Wille zur Macht that once ruled the world ultimately and inevitably come to serve and indeed exemplify that which they sought to subdue. According to Kennedy, human rights lawyers, though they think they are ruled by reason and follow it wherever it leads, are in fact men (and women) of “faith”, a belief in their mission in theory that conveniently conceals how regularly they violate their professed ideals in practice. He has so much fun with this idea—the biblical allusions alone one can come up with are virtually unlimited—that he doesn’t notice how often he contradicts himself. He even contradicts himself to the extent of claiming that they aren’t ruled by faith except that, well, they are:

“What holds them [the lawyers, of course] back from exploring the costs and benefits or unanticipated consequences of their advocacy, their role in the legitimation of conflict or the reproduction of inequality is less belief or faith than a shared practice that arises for each professional as a personal identity—here I stand—combined with strategic cunning. It is difficult not to be reminded of a similar injunction to the believer:

“‘Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.’”14

Well, that takes some unpacking. “Here I stand”—who said that? Martin Luther, of course—not describing himself as a “professional” but rather making a profession of faith, though it would cost him his life. And if it is in fact “difficult” (which I doubt) not to be reminded of Christ’s words of admonition to his disciples, then, again, why doesn’t this make international lawyers persons of faith—rather Jesuitical, perhaps—but don’t they have Christ’s authorization to employ the serpent’s cunning in the name of the dove’s purity, the special privilege of their special virtue?

In the next paragraph, Kennedy surrenders himself to the religious imagery and argument that he had just denied:

“To associate human rights with injustice or bad outcomes both betrays the community of the faithful—“I knew him not”—and is bad strategy. If you bear witness, people will come to believe and act in the name of human rights. To affirm the downsides can only delegitimate law and retard progress toward a better world.”

In this, um, “loaded” paragraph, Kennedy, well, he confuses me. It’s easy to read the first sentence as saying “acknowledging the limitations of the human rights movement—its compromises and evasions—is akin to Peter’s denial of Christ,” though Peter’s (first) denial occurs in the present tense: “Woman, I don’t know him” (Luke 22:57). “I knew him not,” if you want to be fussy, is what John the Baptist said of Christ: “And I knew him not: but that he should be made manifest to Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water” (John 1:31).

The meaning is clear (I think), even though “bear witness” does not mean “if you want to get along, go along”. The attitude that Kennedy is striving to convey is this: “People can’t handle the truth and, anyway, things will get better eventually and they will get better faster if people don’t know about the bad things we have to wink at”—which is what the communists used to say back in the day, and what the Democrats and Republicans are saying today, along with everyone else.

In fact, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and anyone seeking to achieve even “the good” from humanity’s crooked wood is constantly aware of the need to be a team player, not to lose one’s “effectiveness” or “usefulness”, and how often this amounts to keeping your mouth shut, but Dr. Kennedy, though he may not know it, is resolutely Kantian: there is no such thing as a “good lie” and no forgiveness for having uttered one. In an amusing display over his continued confusion over whether “faith” is a good thing or a bad thing, he reproaches human rights lawyers for their lack of capacity for appreciating or experiencing “pluralism”—the recognition that one’s vision of reality is incomplete.

“People recoil from this experience of pluralism. Experts turn back to faith or reach rapidly for the reassurance of theory and prior practice. But there is also a long tradition praising such moments in religious and political thought: the moment when “unknowing” and “deciding” cross paths, when freedom and moral responsibility join hands. It is what Carl Schmitt had in mind by “deciding in the exception” or what Max Weber spoke of as having a “vocation for politics.” It is what Kierkegaard described as “the man of faith,” or Sartre as the exercise of responsible human freedom. This is what Jacques Derrida meant by ‘deconstruction’. The sudden experience of unknowing, with time marching forward to determination, action, decision—the moment when the deciding self feels itself thrust forward, unmoored, into the experience. In that moment of vertigo, the world’s irrationality makes plain the constructed theories about how it all fits together and the tendentiousness of practices in their name. Professional practice suddenly has not progressive telos, and international law opens as a terrain for politics, rather than a recipe or escape from political choice. It is in such a moment that the world could look again like 1648: open to being remade.”

I am such a glutton for unpacking, aren’t I? What is my fucking problem? Well, enough preamble, let’s get on it. Kierkegaard is well worth reading, cum grano salis, but few men were more compulsively “impractical”. I don’t know if Max Weber even claimed to have a vocation for politics, but I do know, from reading his political occasional pieces, that he was, by my standards, a fanatical German imperialist, who wished Germany had attacked France in 1905, when Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, coupled with the ensuing revolutionary unrest, had reduced that country to a military nonentity. His “strategy” during World War I called for Germany to make a “compromise peace” that would leave it dominant in Europe and allow it to position itself for the “Big War” to come with Great Britain, whose empire he fiercely envied and coveted. 15 Sartre, in his private life, was an abominable exploiter of young women and publicly a consistent advocate and apologist for both Stalin and Mao Zhe-Dong, the supreme mass murderers of all time. Is this what is meant by “responsible human freedom”? Astonishment—what Plato called “θαυμάζειν” (“thaumazein”)—is a very philosophical emotion, but it’s not a guaranteed guide to correct action. 16

As for the irrationality of the world, the fact that the world is (largely) irrational does not mean that we can therefore reshape it as we please. It might mean that we cannot reshape it at all. As for Dr. Kennedy’s remark that “international law opens as a terrain for politics, rather than a recipe or escape from political choice,” hasn’t the entire point of his book been that international law is necessarily a “terrain for politics”—that is to say, “a world of struggle”—and the notion that it could be “a recipe or escape from political choice” was simply a mask for relentless self-dealing? And why would removing this mask change the self-dealing thus revealed?

And as for Dr. Kennedy’s last sentence, that it is, in effect, “always 1648”— referring to the Treaty of Westphalia signed in that year to end the Thirty Years War—what was so wonderful about the world that that treaty “remade,” other than that the killing mostly stopped? By modern standards, freedom, either political or religious, existed nowhere in Europe. Major wars began again with the Franco-Dutch War in 1672, followed by the War of the League of Augsburg, and the War of the Spanish Succession, all three wars fought largely in response to Louis XIV’s efforts to make France the dominant power in Europe, in exact opposition to the supposed achievement of the Treaty of Westphalia, whose professed goal was to establish a balance of power in Europe, with each state respecting the others’ sovereignty. In 1709, the effects of the last and bloodiest of the three wars, coupled with a severe winter, reduced the population of France by about 10%—2 to 3 million people, depending on who’s doing the counting.

By any “liberal” standard—and I am a liberal—the greatest “remaking” in history occurred after World War II, which gave peace, prosperity, and political freedom to North America, Western Europe, and Japan. It is “amusing” to me that in his epilogue, Dr. Kennedy seeks to stir his students, and the rest of us, to the “spirit of 1648”, rather than the “spirit of 1945”, because he can’t admit that anything good has happened in recent times. Even the more recent remaking, the “spirit of 1989”, following the collapse of communism, in which we are still in the midst, and of which Dr. Kennedy very largely disapproves, has in fact been more problematic, for a great many reasons, but the gains are still substantial. With all the backsliding in Eastern Europe, life is, shockingly enough, much better without communism than it was with it.

The post-WWII remaking had the “advantage” that, thanks to the Soviet threat to Europe that developed almost immediately after the war, and particularly after the explosion of the Soviet atomic bomb in 1949, the United States felt compelled to offer constant leadership and funding on a very large scale, a compulsion that was lacking after communism collapsed. In addition, the U.S. could “afford” to be magnanimous following World War II because our economy dwarfed any other nation’s. In 1989, we were far richer than in 1945, but by then we faced real competition in many sectors, principally from Germany and Japan.

Even after demanding of his fellow legal drudges an existential crise du cœur generally regarded as the mark of a saint or philosopher, Dr. Kennedy still isn’t done. In the last section of his book, devoted to “law and war”, he clearly intends to paint the “last corruption” of the law in the very darkest colors.

“On the one hand, modern war has engaged the bureaucratic, commercial, and cultural institutions normally associated with peace. On the other, what I term “modern law” has proliferated the doctrinal materials and interpretive methods that can be brought to bear in discussing the distinctiveness and legality of state violence. Lines are now harder to draw, both because the world of war has become more mixed up and because ambiguities, gaps, and contradictions in the materials used to draw the lines have become more pronounced. At the same time, however, there is a lot more line drawing going on. There has been a vast dispersion of sites and institutions and procedures through which legal distinctions about war are made. This proliferation of legally framed activity has made war and sovereign power into legal institutions even as the experience of legal pluralism and fluidity has unhinged the idea of a law which, out there, somehow distinguishes. It would be more accurate today to speak about an international law that places legal distinction in strategic play as a part of war itself, further proliferating and fragmenting the sites of its doctrinal and institutional operation.”

On such a portentous subject, Dr. Kennedy feels obliged to pitch his discourse at an even higher level of generality and incoherence. Why are “lines” now “harder to draw”? What sort of lines are we even talking about? Why, and how, is the “world of war” “more mixed up” than it used to be, and what can it possibly mean to say that “ambiguities, gaps, and contradictions in the materials used to draw the lines have become more pronounced”?

Dr. Kennedy’s intention, unsurprisingly, is to “expose” the fact that law, while pretending to mitigate the horrors of war, has only made them worse. “The idea is that the articulation of right will discipline, limit, and restrain sovereign power when it turns to violence.” Anyone who has made it to the last chapter of Dr. Kennedy’s book knows how that expectation will turn out. “Law has become—for parties on all sides of even the most asymmetric confrontations—a vocabulary for marking legitimate power and justifiable death. It is not too much to say that war has become a legal institution—the continuation of law by other means.”

This strikes me as no more than verbal cuteness. The U.S. Constitution gives the Congress the authority to declare war. Does this mean that under the Constitution war is, and has been, a “legal institution”? Why not?

In fact, the European nations, in their endless collisions with one another—including the Thirty Years War, which was ended by Dr. Kennedy’s beloved Treaty of Westphalia—did repeatedly attempt to develop some “rules for war.” These rules were inevitably bested by the “law of necessity”—most spectacularly in World Wars I and II, when Europe came remarkably close to destroying itself.

The United Nations is a monument to the horrors of the first half of the Twentieth Century, as experienced in Europe. That institution was not, of course, capable of resolving the Cold War. Great nations would not submit to its judgment. Although the Cold War has ended, the same conditions remain today. The United States probably could have conducted a restrained “War on Terror” through the UN, but the Bush Administration, after obtaining the fig leaf of UN approval for the invasion of Iraq, deliberately embarked on a unilateral and “extra-legal” policy in the Middle East, which ultimately proved disastrous.17

Since that time, it’s fair to say that the U.S. has abandoned the forms of legality while waging war, as long as there aren’t a lot of troops involved. There could be, and should be, a book written about the use and abuse of the law under both the Bush and Obama administrations, but Dr. Kennedy, who is not an expert on these matters, does not even render a sketch. Instead, he engages in a flurry of grim verbiage, presumably because if he did not accuse the law of having become death itself, he would not have sufficiently darkened its name. Naturally, Dr. Kennedy does not even mention works such as Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, which dares to suggest that the world is actually getting better.

Dr. Kennedy clearly labors to take his place with the great unmaskers of history, like Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche, and their earnest and unconvincing pseudo-descendants Derrida and Foucault, who “demonstrate” that the world, contrary to universal belief, is not getting better. It’s getting worse! Of the three, Marx alone was the unalloyed optimist, confident that a new and much better world was in fact just around the corner, as soon as the immiseration18 of humanity reached its necessary climax and the expropriators were finally expropriated. Marx felt he could explain why there was evil, and how good could come from it. Rousseau was famously ambivalent about the inevitable though likely horrible revolution to come—its flames could so easily prove to be more consuming than purging. Nietzsche welcomed destruction—it served everyone right. Since Nietzsche had almost no interest in “society” or “humanity”, what survived the wreckage was almost irrelevant. What mattered was that the weak be punished for their unwillingness to live nobly, to live without God.

For many, Rousseau “predicted” the French Revolution, as Marx and Nietzsche predicted the two world wars, though their diagnoses could not have been more different. Yet since World War II, and more spectacularly since the rise of the Reagan-Thatcherite neoliberalism so detested on the Continent, and most spectacularly since the collapse of communism, “advanced thinkers” have been confronted with the greatest of horrors, the renewed triumph of the bourgeois.

Well, not so fast. The “dream” that briefly bloomed from about 1989 through 2008, that the benefits of transparency in politics and economics were so overwhelming that no nation would have any reason to resist them proved grossly optimistic. The power of “unreason”, in the form of persistent Islamic terrorism, in massive economic instability, and, most recently, in xenophobic reactions to both, sweeping across all of Europe, not to mention Donald Trump’s America, has made itself manifest with extraordinary completeness. So does Dr. Kennedy have a point?

In a word, no. Donald Trump’s election strikes me as the worst thing that has happened in the United States in my lifetime—worse than the race riots of the sixties and the war in Vietnam, which were definitely hard times—but I believe that Dr. Kennedy’s picture of a world ruled by remorseless, soulless hypocrites is entirely false, an extension of the “European disease”, the necessity of the clercs to prove their superiority to, and absolute separation from, the bourgeois, a compulsion that is an end in itself and is in fact the point of life.

There was a time when American intellectuals were shockingly in tune with American society. Although a great many intellectuals were contemptuous of Roosevelt and his petty-bourgeois New Deal, and hostile as well to his aggressively hostile stance towards Hitler, the wartime coalition with the Soviet Union, the great triumph over fascism, and the restoration of American prosperity after the war made America look not so bad. The McCarthy era left a very bad taste in the mouth of many intellectuals, but continued prosperity, the election of JFK, and the rebirth of liberal idealism in the form of the modern civil rights movement again encouraged intellectuals to identify with the U.S. America, with all its faults, really was a progressive nation and a force for good.

Vietnam was the great hammer blow to the unity of the left. An early sign to me was the delighted reception given by many intellectuals to Barbara Garson’s vicious 1967 satire MacBird, essentially accusing Lyndon Johnson of murdering JFK. I had the sense that leftists like Dwight MacDonald were tired of being good, tired of behaving themselves and making compromises. They wanted to have fun, to be irresponsible, to hate Lyndon Johnson because was a hick and a hillbilly, to laugh at everyone who wasn’t like themselves.

The split only deepened after the war ended. America didn’t come back to liberalism as the left expected. The civil rights movement, instead of healing America, split the country and began a long-term process of pushing the white working class out of the Democratic Party. The cultural revolutions set in motion by the tumult of the sixties were intoxicating for the few but toxic to the many. The stunningly conservative Ronald Reagan proved to be the new genius of American politics.

Remarkably, the Reagan Era saw both a political and a cultural revolution. For decades, intellectuals had looked down their noses at that ultimate moral nonentity, the businessman. But suddenly, the private sector—particularly that portion of it located in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and along Route 128—had all the glamor. And beyond the glamor was the money, fortunes that beggared the imagination. Millions became billions, and then billions were piled on top of billions. Intellectuals, who once thought they ran the world, and always thought they ought to, could only gape in wonder—wonder and impotent rage—staring upwards at the thousand-foot Midtown aeries of their new masters.

Academia became the last stronghold of the left. The massive expansion of postsecondary education that began in the sixties and swept to new heights in the seventies created thousands of jobs, and these jobs were filled, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences, by the “new left”. Academia was their refuge and their home. Their isolation was proof of their virtue. The cult of the outsider began.

Dr. Kennedy’s book, and Dr. Moyn’s rapturous reception of it, are the fruit of this tree. The “point” of this book is that the outside world is inherently corrupt, is corruption through and through. A World of Struggle is entirely impractical, giving no guide to action, because only a fool or a scoundrel would want to act. In fact, the mere impulse to act is in itself ample evidence that one is a scoundrel.

Dr. Kennedy, of course, is not actually preaching Buddhist withdrawal. He teaches at Harvard Law, not a monastery. He ends his book with a three-page “Epilogue”, assuring his students that it is “1648” once more, or “1918”, though he doesn’t explain why the current time is as pregnant as those prior two dates, and, indeed, in his earlier urgings for spiritual transformation he implies that it is the individual who makes the time rather than the other way around.

But, having “proved”, like Foucault, that “power is everything”, having unmasked every virtue as mere self-seeking, he is at a loss to explain why winning isn’t everything. What’s the point of it “being 1648”? So you can remake the world according to your lust for power instead of someone else’s? Why is that an improvement, other than for your own ego?

The topper to all this, the cherry on the sundae, as it were, is that Drs. Kennedy and Moyn are teaching at Harvard Law, Ego Ground Zero, probably the most ferociously competitive collection of human beings on the face of the earth. And this book is a mask for that appetite. Ensconced in a very palace of privilege, these gentlemen array themselves in the garb of Villon, Baudelaire, and Rambaud, and for that very reason, they have no clothes. 19

Afterwords For two years, I was a singularly undistinguished student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law--arguably, not the same as Harvard. Before dropping out, I came to a number of jaundiced and no doubt highly subjective conclusions. First, that while there were many brilliant lawyers, there were no profound ones. And, second, that law school is essentially a glorified trade school. Only two years are actually necessary. You learn 75% of what you need to know in the first year, and 25% in the second. Bright students naturally blow off their third year; they never go to class and concentrate on what's important, namely, their career.

The truly bright pull a Clinton. When Bill went to Yale, he didn't even bother to show up in New Haven until November. He never went to class, never read the cases, never wrote up a precis. He crammed before exams using study guides and other people's notes, and made law review in his first year. The professors hated him, of course, for "suggesting" that they were worthless, which was largely true, and treating Yale Law School as though it were nothing more than a high-end credentialing/networking service, a (relatively) open access Skull and Bones, so to speak. To prove that they are more than a high-end credentialing/networking service, professors like Kennedy and Moyn at law schools like Yale and Harvard eschew conventional legal treatises entirely, which tend to be tedious, incremental compilations of minutiae, in favor of fashionable, up to minute exercises in gaseous continental sophistication, in order to beguile themselves, if not their students, from their true situation.

White shoe if not white glove. ↩︎

“French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu” is a name not known to me. Dr. Moyn has this to say: “While never freeing expertise from the workings of capital entirely, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu insisted that professional fields had their own internal dynamics of struggle for prestige and status. Yet like Marx, Bourdieu hoped to demystify these workings, for the sake of better insight and political change.” Moyn doesn’t include Nietzsche in his list, but, to my mind, where Nietzsche leads, Foucault follows. ↩︎

James Joyce introduced me to “ineluctable” when he used it in Stephen Daedalus’ seaside meditation on the “ineluctable modality of the visible”. Well, now it’s my turn. ↩︎

Eleanor supposedly made this statement to her private secretary while speculating on the motivation of an unexpected visitor: “I wonder what she wants.” “Maybe she just wanted to say hello.” “Everyone wants something.” ↩︎

[AV footnote] You can read (for free!) what Dave has to say about Francisco in Primitive Legal Scholarship, again, in the Harvard Law Review. ↩︎

Cortéz conquered the Aztec Empire in 1521. Pizarro conquered the Inca Empire in 1533. ↩︎

Quoted by Victor Salas, Francisco De Vitoria On The Ius Gentium And The American Indios, in Ave Maria Law Review. It’s “interesting” that De Vitoria leaves open the possibility that he would accept the archbishopric if he didn’t have to assent to the innocence of the Peruvian adventurers, but his sentiment is still admirable. Unsurprisingly, Catholic legal scholars tend to see Francisco rather differently than the (I’m guessing) secular Dr. Kennedy. ↩︎

The Dutch, having only recently freed themselves from Spanish rule, believed that Spain had grown rich by robbing the “Indians”. They sought to get rich by robbing them both. Louis XIV, in turn, sought to get rich by conquering the Dutch. ↩︎

The Maxim gun was an early machine gun, invented by the American Hiram Maxim. Belloc, when not being an unpleasant, anti-Semitic Catholic apologist, wrote a good deal of clever light verse, rather in the manner of Lewis Carroll, though more political (or socio-political) and less fantastic. ↩︎

To be rude, I think the confusion is his. ↩︎

The revival of the American economy that occurred in the late eighties relied on the manufacturing prowess, not of the United States, but of Asia, as Nike, Apple, etc. all developed elaborate supply chains that spanned the Pacific. ↩︎

Dr. Moyn notes ("notes" as in "complains") that Dr. Kennedy does not follow the accepted scholarly method of using other scholars' ideas. He tends to simply refer to other authors by their last names, does not cite specific works, and never lets them speak for themselves. “Meanwhile, Kennedy mentions a series of twentieth- and twenty first-century authorities in the critical tradition, but normally in endnotes, in an offhand way, without detailed affiliation (or rejection).” ↩︎

That and an obsession with inflation—or rather an obsession with avoiding it—that too conveniently benefits the wealthy while bankrupting the poor. Here Dr. Kennedy’s shoe fits rather well. ↩︎

Matthew 10:16, an apparent conflation of the King James and the New American Standard. ↩︎

Wolfgang J. Mommsen’s Max Weber and German Politics: 1890-1920 demonstrates that Weber, considered by respectable Germans as a dangerous radical, was also a furious chauvinist and racist. ↩︎

I don’t know enough about Carl Schmitt to make fun of him. Regarding Derrida, I have come to the possibly erroneous conclusion that nothing good has come from France since Marcel Proust, with the occasional exception of Albert Camus, and so I don’t read any of them, though, obviously, I do know enough of Sartre to intelligently detest him. ↩︎

Secretary of State Powell’s speech to the UN, which ultimately obtained the UN’s approval of the invasion, was, of course, deeply fraudulent. This cost the Bush Administration its fig leaf. ↩︎

Dr. Kennedy says virtually nothing about communism in his book. Wrong experts? ↩︎

It's true, that as Yeats observed, "there's more enterprise in going naked," but that is better left to poets than professors. ↩︎

#David Kennedy #A World of Struggle #Samuel Moyn

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cfijerusalem · 7 years ago

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WATCHING OVER ZION, JULY 27, 2017 UPDATE

THE WORD

…Unless Adonai builds the house, the builders labour in vain. Unless Adonai watches over the city, the watchman stands guard in vain. In vain you rise up early and stay up late, eating the bread of toil - for He provides for His beloved ones even in their sleep. (Psalm 127:1-2)

But we have this treasure in jars of clay, so that the surpassing greatness of the power may be from God and not from ourselves. We are hard pressed in every way, yet not crushed; perplexed, yet not in despair; persecuted, yet not forsaken; struck down, yet not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Yeshua, so that the life of Yeshua may also be revealed in our mortal body. (2 Corinthians 4:7-10)

POINTERS FOR PRAYERS

Please note: CFI is currently at the New Wine Festival in Somerset for two weeks.Do pray for all of us working at this event.Please pray that we would see the fruit for all the hard labour (Luke 13:18-19). Lift before the LORD the youth of our Churches, that the fire of God would stir up their passion for the LORD, and that revelation would burn in their hearts regarding Israel.Pray that the many souls we challenge would seek the truth regarding God's purposes for Israel, that they would read the literature we hand out regarding the Jewish nation and the CFI ministry, and that many of the youth leaders and Pastors would bring their youth based ministries in line with the Word of God, giving sound teaching on this whole issue.Do keep in touch with us via our Twitter and Facebook feeds.

We are living in a sobering moment in history that calls us, as believers in Yeshua the Messiah (Jesus Christ), to take a stand with Israel. This is not about politics; this is about the Word of God, but the political ramifications are extremely dramatic. God is sovereign – so may we declare God’s sovereign power to accomplish all His purposes in Israel and the Middle East.Stand in prayer against those who would deny Israel’s right to its ancient homeland, and please continue to pray for the complete restoration of the nation of Israel.Pray for a great revelation of Biblical truth to saturate the Arab world – especially with the Palestinian youth - along with those countries that are not ethnically Arab but Muslim – such as Iran and Turkey.Pray that these Arab/Muslim countries would break free from the bondage of false religion and come to a place where the true God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – the God of Israel – would set them free (John 8:32)

Next week Israel will be mourning during the 9th of Av. As you read my report below, pray that in their day of mourning, the nation of Israel and indeed every Jewish man, woman and child would know the day of salvation, and know the awesome hand of the Lord upon them, to give them hope, peace and joy – even in this time of uncertainty.

HARD PRESSED IN EVERY WAY

Working in full time ministry is a tough call. Working with a ministry that is called to Israel is even tougher. I can remember the years in the late 80s to early 90s when I was Chairman of Romanian Children’s Aid in the north of England that I thought this was the toughest place to be. By December 1989 the situation in Romania for the people of the land was very difficult. Years of harsh dictatorial rule, along with the ever increasing privation and austerity had produced an atmosphere that was ripe for change. However, due to the very powerful communist tyranny and repression, not even the most expert and experienced diplomatic and foreign media observers foresaw the sudden overthrow of the Ceausescu regime. Following the uprising, the Romanian people started to dig their way out from under the heavy burden of the brutal dictatorship that had sapped their lifeblood for decades. I remember the first time I went to Bucharest. The city appeared to be really dowdy, dusty and chaotic, a downtrodden city consumed by a struggle for life. I certainly wasn’t prepared for what I was about to witness.

By the time the St Laurence Hospice in Cernavoda had been built, I had been the chairman for the local appeal of Romanian Children’s Aid for some time. Using many ways, we raised lots of money for this much needed project. In Romania, the national currency, the leu, was nearly worthless. To buy anything of value one needed dollars. I also remember that it was like ‘stepping back in time’, almost as if I was in some type of 40s war-time city. Naturally, the biggest shock was when we toured the Orphanages that spilled over with unwanted children, many plagued with AIDS or other serious medical ailments due to the re-use of syringes and the generally shoddy health conditions, along with the infected cheap blood that had been brought in from the Africa’s.

The horrors that Ceausescu had left behind could not be quickly swept under the ‘proverbial carpet’. The physical and psychological damage was huge and widespread, and helping babies and children dying with AIDS was heart-breaking. Yet looking back, raising the need for help was relatively easy. Show the church, or even the secular world photos of dying children, and the aid comes pouring in. Tell the church regarding Israel… now that’s a tough ask. As for telling the world, well, I think you get the picture. On top of that, I never wanted to get involved with Israel… it was God’s calling upon my life that pushed me into it. But it’s a tough calling! Yet if it can be tough for me, what of the people of Israel?

As the difficult day of the 9th of Av approaches, I pondered on just why many within the world hate the Jew, and just why so many also hate the nation of Israel. Tisha b'Av is on Tuesday August 1st this year (actually it starts the day before as the sun goes down). Tisha b'Av (the 9th of Av) is a difficult day in the Jewish calendar to grasp. On this date in history, the First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 586 BC. Five centuries later in 70 AD, the Second Temple was destroyed on the same day as the first - the 9th of Av. When the Jewish people rebelled against Roman rule, they believed that their leader, Simon bar Kokhba, would fulfil their messianic longings – even though their Messiah, Yeshua (Jesus) had predicted the destruction of the second temple many years earlier (see Matthew 24). Of course many Jews did accept Yeshua as Messiah and birthed the first Messianic Congregations (or Churches), however many didn’t accept Him and looked to bar Kokhba, but their hopes were dashed in 133 AD as the Jewish rebels were brutally butchered in the final battle at Betar. The date of the massacre was again on the 9th of Av!

Sadly, trouble erupted on the Temple Mount again this past weekend as Arab Palestinians – mainly youth – clashed with Police. Following the killing of Israeli Policemen, Israel put up metal detectors to check what the Islamic “worshipers” were carrying, however most Muslims refused to enter through the barriers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtQKnBOXLX0). Israel has since taken down the barriers and still most of the Arab Palestinians refuse to enter Temple Mount. But what are the facts behind all this. This week many more Israelis were killed, but was anything mentioned on the Western Media news channels? And when areas were covered, what critical facts did the media leave out? And why did some headlines make it look like there's no moral difference between the victims and the attackers who killed them? Well, Honest Reporting has been breaking down the events, the facts and the media failures. In an excellent report they show just what has been going on – click here to view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryKeoZaipDs.

As you will have heard if you watched the Honest Reporting clip, another horrific terrorist attack took place in Neve Tzuf, a small Israeli town in the Judean Hills last Friday evening. What started as a family Shabbat dinner left a father, son, and daughter dead and a mother in critical condition after a teenage Arab Palestinian terrorist entered the home and began stabbing the family members while the children hid in a closet. Were it not for the miracle of an IDF (Israel Defence Force) soldier nearby who neutralized the terrorist, the incident would have been much more horrific than it already is. The irony is that these poor Israeli Jews were killed and the rest of their family are grieving their loss, yet all the while, the Palestinian terrorist who murdered them is being nursed in an Israel hospital!

Despite being the holiest site in Judaism, Jews and Christians are forbidden to perform any acts of worship on the Temple Mount, including uttering prayers, due to Muslim threats of violence. Visibly-religious Jews are scrutinized carefully by police and arrested if suspected of praying. Where is the justice?

However, back to Tisha b’Av, more sad facts are also linked to this date. According to records, the Jewish people were expelled from England in 1290 AD on the 9th of Av. Then in 1492, the Golden Age of Spain came to a close when Queen Isabella and her husband Ferdinand ordered that the Jews be banished from the land. The edict of expulsion was signed on March 31, 1492, and the Jews were given exactly four months to put their affairs in order and leave the country. The Hebrew date on which no Jew was allowed any longer to remain in Spain where they had enjoyed welcome and prosperity was the 9th of Av. World War I that began in 1914 is also part of these statistics, as when Germany declared war on Russia, effectively catapulting the First World War into motion was on the 9th of Av. And… it is said, the first gas chambers during the Holocaust in the Second World War were first put into use on the 9th of Av. Understandably, the Jewish people mourn on this date.

Thinking of how the Jewish people mourn, my thoughts turned to how our duty as Christians is to love them, stand with them and pray for them. What a shame much of the church spurns the Jews – specifically when it comes to Israel. How true of the famous quote that states, ‘How odd of God to choose the Jews. But not so odd as those who choose, a Jewish God yet spurn the Jews!’ Feeling not unlike Solomon when writing his book of Ecclesiastes, I started to ponder more famous Jewish quotes. Golda Meir, Israel’s first female prime minister, during a 1957 speech stated, “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”

On a similar theme, Benjamin Netanyahu in 2006 stated, “The truth is that if Israel were to put down its arms there would be no more Israel. If the Arabs were to put down their arms there would be no more war.” It was another Israeli Prime Minister, this time Yitzchak Rabin in 1993 that stated, “We, the soldiers who have returned from battle stained with blood, we who have seen our relatives and friends killed before our eyes, we who have attended their funerals and cannot look into the eyes of their parents, we who have come from a land where parents bury their children, we who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough.” Sadly, the Arab world have not listened, nor learnt that they cannot oppose Israel without first opposing God (Zechariah 2:8).

In pondering on the issue of the first gas chambers in the Holocaust being put into use on the 9th of Av, I’d like to include one last famous Jewish saying from the Mishnah that states, ‘Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.’ (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:9).

When horror on a grand scale is witnessed by simple human beings who have some form of humanity - a kindness or gentleness within their spirit - they often find it impossible to put into words just how they feel. I remember one story from Major Leonard Berney as he tried to describe what he witnessed being one of the first Allied soldiers to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp towards the end of the Second World War. Major Berney stated that words could not describe the “absolutely horrendous” scenes which greeted him when he first drove through the gates of the prison camp in Germany on April 15 1945. In one interview I heard him trying to describe what he witnessed, he stated, “We'd all been fighting for months through Germany and we were used to seeing casualties and people being killed and maimed, but never had we ever seen anything like this. When we got there, there were said to be about 60,000 people in the camp, of which 10,000 were dead, and they were, in fact, dying at 500 a day.” Major Berney went on to state, “The disease, the emaciation and the horrors that were there were absolutely indescribable.” For the Jew, the 9th of Av is indeed a time to mourn.

Please do pray that in their day of mourning, the nation of Israel and indeed every Jewish man, woman and child would know the day of salvation, and know the awesome hand of the Lord upon them, to give them hope, peace and joy – even in this time of uncertainty.

THEY CYCLE OF ISLAMIC VIOLENCE

Just over four weeks ago, our son Matthew bought a brand new car – well he does work hard for Google so why not! Two weeks later and some brainless thugs broke into it as it sat on the drive at our home. They used a crow bar on the boot, smashed windows and left mud all over the inside as they tried, but failed to steal it. You can imagine my anger! But imagine this… imagine if Matthew was blamed for the incident due to it being “too much of a temptation for the brainless thugs” who couldn’t help themselves. And actually, the Police were pretty useless coming to investigate two days after the incident as the car was being repaired in the garage! Well that is something of how I see the scenario in Jerusalem.

Even though Israel has removed the metal detectors from the entrances to the Temple Mount, which were placed following a terror attack there on July 14, 2017, in which 2 Israelis were murdered, Abbas' Fatah Movement is still protesting against Israel's security measures and vowing to "thwart the Zionists' plans" with "our blood". The text on image (below) states: "The surveillance and espionage cameras are a violation of freedom of worship. Freedom of worship is limited by the intelligence cameras. With our blood we will thwart the Zionists' plans. #No_to_the_cameras" [Official Fatah Facebook page, July 25, 2017].

According to the Palestinian Media Watch who have been reported the events of the past two weeks, the Palestinian Authority and Fatah leaders have encouraged the Arab Palestinian riots to escalate and encouraged the Palestinians to "rage" in Jerusalem. Israel placed metal detectors and security cameras at the entrances to the Temple Mount simply because three terrorists shot dead two Israeli policemen. While ignoring Israel's reason for installing these security measures to prevent future attacks on the holy site, the PA and Fatah leaders have presented this step as a "violation," claiming it is "a step on the way to establishing the alleged Temple."

PMW state that “This claim plays on the fears Palestinian leaders continuously are trying to sow among Palestinians that "the Al-Aqsa Mosque is in danger" of being destroyed by Israel.” The media then distorts the truth, Israel gets the blame, and so the cycle continues. So when I erect a security camera and spotlight, will the burglars and mindless thugs who smashed up my son’s car complain to the BBC that “it’s not fair?” It’s a strange world we now live in!

CFI’s YOUTUBE PAGE

Many of you may know that CFI has various social media pages including Facebook and Twitter. However, we also have a YouTube page which is currently being revamped. I have been adding some new content (over 13 videos) of fairly recent talks etc. and a few from the Jerusalem 30th anniversary conference. You can view it here https://www.youtube.com/user/isrelate/videos. However, my son Matthew and I have also been working on a promo show reel video which lasts just over 4 minutes.

The first half shows various photos that I have taken around Israel. Then it goes on to show various areas of the CFI UK ministry which I have compiled. Matthew then created the video and added music (the music was provided free of charge by Beat Suite - a Recording Studio were Matthew used to work for before he moved to Google. We put the show-reel to show off the beauty of the land of Israel and to briefly demonstrate the work CFI do here in the UK. We hope you're blessed by us sharing it. Please click on the CFI YouTube page and give the video a ‘like’. You can watch the full version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X8WSEj2tEQ

David Soakell

CFI WoZ News Report Correspondent

Tweet me @David_Soakell

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cabiba · 8 years ago

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A sign of strange times: 1984 by George Orwell has become a bestseller yet again. Here is a book distinguished for its dark view of the state, together with a genuine despair about what to do about it. Strangely, this view is held today by the Right, the Left, and even people who don’t think of themselves as loyal to either way. The whole fiasco happening in D.C. seems insoluble, and the inevitable is already taking place today as it did under the presidents who preceded Trump: the realization that the new guy in town is not going to solve the problem.Now arrives the genuine crisis of social democracy. True, it’s been building for decades but with the rise of extremist parties in Europe, and the first signs of entrenched and sometimes violent political confrontations in the United States, the reality is ever more part of our lives. The times cry out for some new chapter in public life, and a complete rethinking of the relationship between the individual and the state and between society and its governing institutions.

Origins of the Problem

At a speech for college students, I asked the question: who here knows the term social democracy? Two hands of more than one hundred went up. That’s sad. The short answer is that social democracy is what we have now and what everyone loves to hate. It’s not constitutionalism, not liberalism, not socialism in full, and not conservatism. It’s unlimited rule by self-proclaimed elites who think they know better than the rest of us how to manage our lives.

By way of background, at the end of the Second World War, the intellectual and political elites in the United States rallied around the idea that ideology was dead. The classic statement summing up this view in book form came in 1960: The End of Ideology by Daniel Bell. A self-described "socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture,” he said that all wild-eyed visions of politics had come to an end. They would all be replaced by a system of rule by experts that everyone will love forever.

To be sure, the ultimate end-of-ideology system is freedom itself. Genuine liberalism (which probably shouldn’t be classified as an ideology at all) doesn’t require universal agreement on some system of public administration. It tolerates vast differences of opinion on religion, culture, behavioral norms, traditions, and personal ethics. It permits every form of speech, writing, association, and movement. Commerce, producing and trading toward living better lives, becomes the lifeblood. It only asks that people – including the state – not violate basic human rights.

But that is not the end of ideology that Bell and his generation tried to manufacture. What they wanted was what is today called the managerial state. Objective and scientific experts would be given power and authority to build and oversee large-scale state projects. These projects would touch on every area of life. They would build a cradle-to-grave welfare state, a regulatory apparatus to make all products and services perfect, labor law to create the perfect balance of capital and labor, huge infrastructure programs to inspire the public (highways! space! dams!), finetune macroeconomic life with Keynesian witchdoctors in charge, a foreign-policy regime that knew no limits of its power, and a central bank as the lender of last resort.

What Bell and that generation proposed wasn’t really the end of ideology. It was a codification of an ideology called social democracy. It wasn’t socialism, communism, or fascism as such. It was a gigantically invasive state, administered by elite bureaucrats, blessed by intellectuals, and given the cover of agreement by the universal right of the vote. Surely nothing can truly be oppressive if it is takes place within the framework of democracy.

A Brief Peace

The whole thing turned out to be a pipe dream. Only a few years after the book appeared, ideology came roaring back with a vengeance, mostly in reaction to the ossification of public life, the draft for the Vietnam war, and the gradual diminution of economic prospects of the middle class. The student movement rose up, and gained momentum in response to the violent attempts to suppress it. Technology gave rise to new forms of freedom that were inconsistent with the static and officious structure of public administration. Political consensus fell apart, and the presidency itself – supposed to be sacrosanct in the postwar period – was dealt a mighty blow with the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Government no longer held the high ground.

All that seemed to hold the old post-war social-democratic consensus together was the Cold War itself. Surely we should put aside our differences so long as our country faces an existential threat of Soviet communism. And that perception put off the unleashing of mass discontent until later. In a shocking and completely unexpected turn, the Cold War ended in 1989, and thus began a new attempt to impose a post-ideological age, if only to preserve what the elites had worked so hard to build.

This attempt also had its book-form definitive statement: The End of History by Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama wrote, “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

It was Bell 2.0 and it didn’t last long either. Over the last 25 years, every institution of social democracy has been discredited, on both the Right and the Left, even as the middle class began to face a grim economic reality: progress in one generation was no longer a reliable part of the American dream. The last time a government program really seemed to work well was the moon landing. After that, government just became a symbol of the worst unbearable and unworkable burden. Heavily ideological protest movements began to spring up in all corners of American public life: the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Bernie, Trump, and whatever comes next.

The Core Problem

Every public intellectual today frets about the fracturing of American civic life. They wring their hands and wonder what has gone wrong. Actually, the answer is more simple than it might first appear. Every institution within this framework – which grew more bloated and imperious over time – turned out to be untenable in one or another sense. The experts didn’t know what they were doing after all, and this realization is shared widely among the people who were supposed to be made so content by their creation.

Every program fell into one of three categories of failure.

Financially unsustainable. Many forms of welfare only worked because they leveraged the present against the future. The problem with that model is that the future eventually arrives. Think of Social Security. It worked so long as the few in older groups could pillage the numerous in younger groups. Eventually the demographics flipped so that the many were on the receiving end and the few were on the paying end. Now young people know that they will be paying their whole lives for what will amount to a terrible return on investment. It was the same with Medicare, Medicaid, and other forms of fake “insurance” instituted by government. The welfare state generally took a bad turn, becoming a way of life rather than a temporary help. Subsidy programs like housing and student loans create unsustainable bubbles that burst and cause fear and panic.

Terminally Inefficient. All forms of government intervention presume a frozen world without change, and work to glue down institutions in a certain mode of operation. Public schools today operate as they did in the 1950s, despite the spectacular appearance of a new global information system that has otherwise transformed how we seek and acquire information. Antitrust regulations deal with industrial organization from years ago even as the market is moving forward; by the time the government announces its opinion, it hardly matters anymore. And you can make the same criticism of a huge number of programs: labor law, communications regulations, drug approvals and medical regulations, and so on. The costs grow and grow, while the service and results are ever worse.

Morally unconscionable. The bailouts after the 2008 financial crisis were indefensible to average people of all parties. How can you justify using all the powers of the federal government to feed billions and trillions overall to well-connected elites who were the very perpetrators of the crisis? Capitalism is supposed to be about profits and losses, not private profits and socialized losses. The sheer injustice of it boggles the mind, but this only scratches the surface. How can you pillage average Americans of 40% of their income while blowing the money on programs that are either terminally inefficient, financially unsustainable, or just plain wrong? How can a government expect to administer a comprehensive spying program that violates any expectation of privacy on the part of citizens? Then there is the problem of wars lasting decades and leaving only destruction and terror guerilla armies in their wake.

All of this can remain true without creating a revolutionary situation. What actually creates the tipping point in which social democracy morphs into something else? What displaces one failed paradigm with another? The answer lies with an even a deeper problem with social democracy. You can discern it from this comment by F.A. Hayek in 1939. “Government by agreement is only possible provided that we do not require the government to act in fields other than those in which we can obtain true agreement."

Agreement No More

Exactly. All public institutions that are politically stable – even if they are inefficient, offer low quality, or skirt the demands of basic morality – must at the minimum presume certain levels of homogeneity of opinion (at least) in the subject population; that is to say, they presume a certain minimum level of public agreement to elicit consent. You might be able to cobble this together in small countries with homogeneous populations, but it becomes far less viable in large countries with diverse populations.

Opinion diversity and big government create politically unstable institutions because majority populations begin to conflict with minority populations over the proper functions of government. Under this system, some group is always feeling used. Some group is always feeling put upon and exploited by the other. And this creates huge and growing tensions in the top two ideals of social democracy: government control and broadly available public services.

We created a vast machinery of public institutions that presumed the presence of agreement that the elites thought they could create in the 1950s but which has long since vanished. Now we live in a political environment divided between friends and foes, and these are increasingly defined along lines of class, race, religion, gender identity, and language. In other words, if the goal of social democracy was to bring about a state of public contentedness and confidence that the elites would take care of everything, the result has been the exact opposite. More people are discontented than ever.

F.A. Hayek warned us in 1944: when agreement breaks down in the face of unviable public services, strongmen come to the rescue. Indeed, I’ve previous argued that the smugness of today’s social democrats is entirely unwarranted. Trump won for a reason: the old order is not likely coming back. Now the social democrats face a choice: jettison their multicultural ideals and keep their beloved unitary state, or keep their liberal ideals and jettison their attachment to rule by an administrative elite.

Something has to give. And it is. Dark and dangerous political movements are festering all over the Western world, built from strange ideological impulses and aspiring to new forms of command and control. Whatever comes of them, it will have little to do with the once-vaunted post-war consensus, and even less to do with liberty.

Presidential advisor Steve Bannon is a dark figure – straight out of Orwell – but he is smart enough to see what the Left does not see. He claims to want to use the Trump years to “deconstruct the administrative state.” Notice that he doesn’t say dismantle much less abolish; he wants to use it for different purposes, to build a new national collective under a more powerful executive.

The institutions built by the paternalistic, urbane, and deeply smug social democrats are being captured by interests and values with which they profoundly disagree. They had better get used to it. This is just the beginning.

The partisans of the old order can fight a hopeless battle for restoration. Or they can join the classical liberals in rallying around the only real solution to the crisis of our time: freedom itself. These are the ideological battle lines of the future, not Left vs. Right but freedom vs. all forms of government control.

#fee.org #social democracy

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