Negative Outlook?

Insane in the Ukraine* (or the plight of the buffer state)

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Ukraine's parliament on Saturday declared invalid the disputed presidential election that triggered a week of growing street protests and legal maneuvers, raising the possibility that a new vote could be held in this former Soviet republic.

Is it not radical to pass along the thoughts of the Iranian journalist below, even though he's rebelling against of one of America's enemies and one of the world's rogue regimes? Is it silly to ask such a question?

Things are looking better for Ukraine's 48 million inhabitants, at least to some. To others on the left, the fact that Ukrainians would have a general strike in order to "globalize" and integrate further into the West and hook up with the IMF and the dreaded Washington Consensus is no cause for celebration. Anything that makes the hyperpower look good is bad. It's a truism.

Putin was against the removal of Saddam Hussein, once dictator of the Saudi's Sunni buffer state against the 73 million Shias of Iran, and now he's against the removal of his puppet regime in Ukraine. The irony is that the opposition would remove troops from Iraq.

It appears that Putin is backing down - Bush didn't do anything about his Czarist power grab a few months ago and the US is in general more conciliatory than it needs to be. We need a multilateral approach in "the war on terror" after all.

*heading stolen from Slate.

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wonder if he pulped it

His remark reminds me of when I worked in a wood-pulp mill in western Iran during the early years of the Islamic revolution. In the first decade after 1979, many intellectuals, anticipating being arrested, cleared their bookshelves and left their "illegal" volumes on street corners. Piles of these books found their way to the mill, where we reduced them to pulp. One day, throwing books into the mill, I grasped a Farsi version of Marx's "Capital." Immediately, I knew it was my own copy; I recognized the book by its feel, it was so familiar to my touch.

Today's intellectuals, if they haven't turned to smoking opium or drinking homemade liquor, devote themselves to literature, primarily Farsi, European, Russian and South American.
...

The vast majority of people here cross their fingers for a sudden explosion, or pray for American successes in Iraq and Afghanistan to increase the price of suppression by the theocracy in Iran. But that is the limit.

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red states = magical thinking

Weber used the term Entzauberung—“dis-enchantment”—to describe the way in which science and technology had inevitably displaced magical thinking. The new rationalism had the instrumental advantage of allowing the world to be mastered. But what the new thinking couldn’t provide was, in terms of lived experience, hardly less important. Rationality could do everything but make sense of itself.

Elizabeth Kolbert writes about Max Weber, the "bourgeois Marx."

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Mon Dieu!

The excellent Doug Ireland translates what the fuss is
all about at Le Monde.

(via Marc Cooper)

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Turning point, hinge moment, tipping point, etc.

Both Fareed Zakaria and Tom Friedman see "Fallujah" as a turning point/tipping point for Iraq. Pan back and it could be a hinge moment for the wider conflict between the decadent West and Islamic nihilism and its accompanying anarchy.

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Q & A with Heather Havrilesky

(via Matt Welch)

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Even though I grew up in Chicago and live here now, I went to college in Nashville for four years and lived in Austin, Texas for two and have to agree with Neal Pollack that the post-election "fuck the South" meme is wrongheaded.

(via Hit and Run)

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Nation's Poor Win Election for Nation's Rich (or the pull of the superstructure)

45 percent of those with incomes under $50,000 voted for Bush, while 41 percent of those with incomes over $100,000 voted for Kerry.

It would have been nice had Kerry won the electoral college and lost the popular vote, which would have set in relief how the electoral college system distorts the "popular will." The fact that smaller states get two Senators each could then have been pointed at as well as a similar problem.

Hopefully, Bush will "spend some of his capital" on the creation of a Palestinian state. If so, Tony Blair will deserve some credit.

A majority of the voters seemed to decide to keep Bush because of the "war on terror." The large increase in Hispanics voting for Bush offset to some degree Bush's negatives on the economy and Iraq. His moderation on immigration policy probably helped here, but I heard an interesting theory that hard-working immigrants were drawn to the optimistic Republican themes on the economy, however counterintuitive that may sound.

As nice as it was to see the large voter turnout, I'm glad the contest is over between the Democrats' lacklaster candidate who argued Iraq was a mistake and the President who made Abu Ghraib shorthand for American torture of Muslims.

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