October 7th pushed Israel over the edge. It's invaded Syria and the new ruler, Joulani, is talking to Iran, Russia and Turkey. Everyone in the region wants stability, and Israel wants... Lebensraum. 

Mada Masr, Interview with Trevor LeGassik,  

HG: Ahmed Amin in Fajr al-Islam (The Dawn of Islam, 1928) and Taha Hussein were interested in writing about this period in the modern way of studying and writing history.

TL: Yes of course, and you know how it all started? It was Mohamed Hussein Heikal Pasha, who was a lawyer, novelist and a senate, and who on holiday in Luxor found Washington Irving’s book about the Prophet Mohamed and it blew him away, because in the 1930s in Cairo and in all the Arab world there was no easy way to find anything much about the Prophet Mohamed. Everyone knew the Quran and serious scholars knew classical manuscripts like Ibn Kathir, but they were not easily accessible or understandable, and so he wrote his own Hayat Muhammed (Life of Mohamed). Curiously then, it was Irving’s writings — who was an American author appointed ambassador to Spain — that inspired all these writers in Cairo in the 1930s, and if it wasn’t for him, it would have taken decades to produce accessible books about the Prophet. Who has time to read four volumes of Ibn Kathir?

Done fucking with this

---

repeats of repeats: The distinction between collaborative reason in the academy its proud imitators and adversarial reason in the world at large.

Continuing from the previous post, and building on it in light of news.

I've quoted this scene for years, and used it as part of a montage without sound, but I've never posted the scene straight. As I said 20 years ago, "When it is so easy to share, people will do it. And whether or not that sharing should be bound in some sense by other forms of obligation is largely irrelevant."  "Downloading is theft, but if the opportunity is ubiquitous then theft will be too, and you will need to change your model."  Capitalists realized that takedown notices are bad for business and they adapted, so I'm blocked from making money off the video. It's not that "data wants to be free"; it's realism. I didn't expect to be bringing in Aaron Swartz, but there you go. Economic reason is adversarial within the model of markets, but not all social relations are economic. Adversarialism is formal. It's a game, and games have rules. But libertarians don't believe in games. They believe in "truth".

"For the aesthetic in general as an expression of the supreme ultimate value of a system can influence the result of ethical action only secondarily, just as “wealth” is not the main goal but the side effect of individual commercial activity. And “wealth” itself is an irrational concept. It is an almost mystical process, the setting of ethical values: Arising from the irrational, transforming the irrational to the rational, yet nonetheless it is the irrational that radiates from within the resulting form."
Hermann Broch

Jack Balkin debates fascists. 

The republican tradition certainly hopes that citizens and officials alike will possess civic virtue and be devoted to the common good. At the same time, it does not assume that government officials will in fact have civic virtue and be adequately devoted to the public good. Republican theory focuses instead on the fact that republics are difficult to maintain and easily corrupted; that government officials—and especially executive officials—are likely to engage in self-aggrandizement, self-dealing and a desire to maintain power; that representative government can easily slide into oligarchy; and that public officials will undermine the public good in the process. Anyone who has lived through recent American history can understand the contemporary relevance of these ideas.

Vermeule, by contrast, is comparatively complacent about these questions. Along with Eric Posner, he coined the phrase "tyrannophobia" to describe an excessive concern with government overreaching, self-aggrandizement and illegitimate attempts by rulers to entrench themselves in power.

But what Vermeule regards as a pathology of thought is actually a central idea in the republican tradition—and the liberal tradition as well. It is precisely because of a deep concern that public officials will become corrupt, misbehave, or try to entrench themselves in power that the republican tradition has focused on questions of separation of powers, checks and balances, rule of law limitations, and rights.

Balkin's contribution as part of a symposium that includes more than one: Vermeule and an earnest defender. There's a time for choosing honey over vinegar, and those are Balkin's words, but this ain't it.  

repeats: Leiter's model of academic discourse, paraphrased  

Universities would deserve criticism for rejecting a presentation by the authors of the Nuremberg Laws, but would be right in rejecting a speech by a rabble-rousing journalist who promotes them.

John Quiggin, 2008: "Sunstein argues that the echo chamber effect tends to reinforce existing views and produce a poisonous partisan divide. It seems to me that exactly the opposite is true. "

repeats

I always thought Sunstein's point was obvious, especially for any culture founded on individualist liberalism. It's that culture that's given us Facebook and surveillance capitalism and personalized marketing, the virtual store where the displays are changed and items moved to the front to fit your last purchases. Newsfeeds work the same way, reinforcing biases, from narrowcasting to microcasting to the narcissism where the world is reduced to a mirror.

Twitter changed its algorithm years ago, forcing you to choose between replying to a tweet and quoting it, limiting the exposure of either your followers or those of the person you're replying to. Up to that point a reply appeared on both timelines.

Ryan Cooper 

Have you ever argued with a conservative? They won't learn anything no matter what I say or where I say it. Whatever I say is wrong by definition.

The same is "true"—the same facts hold—for liberals, and for most people. They hold for Cooper. 

The web was made by techs and in the Anglosphere self-selected for technocratic culture—I haven't used that link in a while. It's was made for talking to your friends, not for argument. I was told that 20 years ago. It's the model of civility, contempt and passive aggression basic to academia under the pretense that academia, educated liberals, the elite, the licensed vanguard are just that.  It was always bullshit.  Balkin, practicing "high politics" treats Vermeule as a friend. He's from the same tradition as Panofsky, but he's weaker. He called Vermeule and Posner "fine young scholars", when they defended legalized torture. I had more patience in 2004.

Balkin has a tag. Vermeule has one.  I emailed Balkin as I do sometimes, to ask him why he's done it again, ceding ground to opponents of democracy.  

I've gotten drunk with honest reactionaries. They're better company than hypocrites. I cede them nothing. But I have more contempt for liberals like Cooper who are blind to what they are. 

If everything is political, then high politics and low politics both have their place.  There's a time for debate and a time to stand on principle and walk away. If you don't understand both you don't understand either.

The Mortara Case "Why Some Catholics Defend the Kidnapping of a Jewish Boy"

Dreher, 16 days earlier:

The invention of the "Judeo-Christian" tradition, etc.

 repeating the link above.

Most arguments against mass surveillance don't respond fully substantively to claims that you shouldn't worry if you "have nothing to hide".  Defense of personal freedom isn't enough.  What's needed is an argument in defense of the need for citizens in a democratic state to be able to be all kinds of wrong, all kinds of confused, creepy, conflicted, desirous, weepy or hate-filled, so that they may be able to learn to understand and outgrow their childishness. The choice is between a community of adults with a minority of the inveterately childish and criminal or a community of children ruled by moralists and crime lords.

Freedom of speech is the right to argue for freedom of property. Those who defend freedom of property are among the first to oppose freedom of speech. I support Vermeule's right to be a fascist, but an earnest engagement with his ideas is to take fascism seriously as an intellectual position. Allowing the argument to exist does not mean treating it with respect. It means destroying it, again, and again.

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."

I like Balkin, but he's a law professor, not a lawyer. He's passive. He's not a legal philosopher—they all suck—but he doesn't understand the importance of vulgarity. 

I forgot I'd used this with Vermeule already. All I do is repeat myself.

…in a hospital tent at the clearing station I came across a man with a French flag wrapped around his waist; the medics discovered it when they cut his shirt away. He was a hard-looking, blondish chap with a mouthful of gold teeth and a face adorned by a cross-shaped knife scar—the croix de vache with which procurers sometimes mark business rivals. An interesting collection of obscene tattooing showed on the parts of him that the flag did not cover. Outwardly he was not a sentimental type.
"Where are you from?" I asked him.
"Belleville," he said. Belleville is a part of Paris not distinguished for its elegance.
"What did you do in civilian life?" I inquired.
That made him grin. "I lived on my income," he said.
"Why did you choose the Corps Franc?"
"Because I understood," he said. 

And again: thugs against fascists

"He was always a loser, a jest/he barely got 50% on his high-school test/with a bribe the rich kid's a fool no more/got 100 diplomas hanging on his door/You crows nesting in our house/why are you ruining all our fun?

We won't do as you tell us/Spare us your face/Cook up your case/That's what the Interior does/I'm arrested and charged as a terrorist/Just for holding a flare and singing Ahly"

All philosophy is perverse.

"...paperback originals with French flaps, using a custom serif typeface"

in re: the contemporary ubiquity of academic discussions of "images": the art of the past framed thoughtlessly in the language of the present. Benjamin returns us to the Gothic in more ways than one; focusing on immateriality and ideas—ideas are immaterial—takes us out of the world. 

A monk staring at an icon is looking for "truth". Painters like storytellers are craftsmen, makers of fictions, illusions, and "lies". "There’s no art more ironic than a Fra Angelico."  Historians are secularists; priests are sincere. Philosophy is so fucking reactionary. 

new tag: The Same Story About Barthes

I used to be fond of "subaltern" academics in the west, but they've become so successful that the outsider status has become aestheticized. Academia serves its own interests. The romanticism of the international hereditary PMC: a discussion of Egyptian political prisoners is a discussion of prison abolition, which follows a discussion of Egyptian architectural modernism. Utopianism is anti-political. Academia is a safe space for priests and pedantry.

Honoured to be launching (with visionary curator @lisa_g_dub) @alaa’s You Have Not Yet Been Defeated at this year’s Dublin Art Book Fair. In conversation with @AnniefletcherR and with readings by @asoueif @seanehewitt and @RonitLentin https://t.co/qRBxu12ItC

— Hussein A H Omar (@chebhocine) November 8, 2021

Put a pdf on the fucking web. Share it "for the revolution". Fuck "curators", "aestheticized politics", and "French flaps, using a custom serif typeface".  Fuck "Coffee table architectural favela porn.” 

And who gives a fuck about the fucking Queen?

There is also a brisk traffic in arms: US manufacturers recently announced the sale to _____ of 24 new F-16 fighter jets and other equipment, worth an estimated $3.2 billion. Steven Cook at the Council on Foreign Relations has published a ‘contingency planning memorandum’ in favour of continued support to the regime, which, as he describes it, ‘has helped create a regional order that makes it relatively inexpensive for the United States to exercise its power’. 

I'm so sick of the "responsible" anti-war blather that the US could never win the war or that "America is not capable of 'nation-building'." 

The US was never interested in nation-building in Afghanistan; it was interested in exercising its power. It won the war easily, but victory wasn't enough. Trying to work on the cheap, predictably, it chose bribery. Laziness and cheapness over time is saving $5 to spend 10, as corruption reinforces itself, undermining the state in the US as in Afghanistan. 

Meanwhile this is one of the "serious" Americans:

"While the U.S. war in Vietnam was a pointless tragedy that resulted in untold human misery, it was not totally absurd for U.S. decision-makers to believe that communism was an existential threat worth fighting. The same cannot be said for the war in Afghanistan—"   

The Quincy Institute is an American organization for an American audience.

---  

Bessner previously

writing-rewriting 

--- 

What is striking about the videos, though, is how often this entitlement is laced with insecurity. The attackers profess ownership of this house, but so much of their commentary betrays discomfort and alienation within it, bordering on a sort of provincial awe.

The petulance of angry tourists. An angry herd of anxious individualists, the spoiled American petty bourgeoisie, once bought off,  now in decline.

The sentence above was quoted by The Economist's Middle East correspondent, Greg Carlstrom, on Twitter. AbuKhalil used to say it was the only mainstream publication worth reading, because it was truly international, like capitalism. 

The Parler videos are collected here and  here; the New Yorker writer's video is here. 

Hoberman reviews  Jaden X, "The Storming of the Capitol", in Artforum. 

Tape recorders, ordinary cameras, and movie cameras are already extensively owned by wage-earners. The question is why these means of production do not turn up at factories, in schools, in the offices of the bureaucracy, in short, everywhere there is social conflict.

—Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” New Left Review (1970)

HOW QUAINT that question seems today.

Hoberman wrote without knowing Sullivan's history, allowing him to bypass the fact that if the people storming the Capital had been black, or associated with BLM, they'd have been shot.  The update and amendation isn't quite enough. 

The cloying theatricality of American protests, or those that attract an audience. Occupy vs Wisconsin, again.

Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism....Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism.

The black bourgeoisie rising, in racial and class solidarity. Coates is predictable 

Videos from Cairo in 2013. al Sisi's coup: the Muslim Brotherhood records the destruction of their protest camp by the military. Full post-production, color grading and music. They posted the raw footage, but youtube removed it. There's art to this –politicized aesthetics is aestheticized politics– but it's not cosplay. 

And Mosireen

NY Daily News. Cops arrest NYC workers during Hunts Point Produce Market strike for better wages. 

The computerized voice, text-to-speech typed into a console by a man in a car off camera. Hollywood dystopianism. Someone should review it.

 

MADISON, Wis. — Someone in Egypt has been paying attention to what’s happening in Madison and wanted to send a message of solidarity from across the globe — so they ordered a pizza.

It might seem like a small gesture, but it’s overwhelming to the staff at Ian’s on State Street — a campus staple mere blocks from the Capitol — where in the last few days, they’ve fielded calls from concerned citizens of 14 countries, and all 50 states and the District of Columbia looking to donate money to provide free pizza to the Wisconsinites who have congregated here.

On Saturday alone, Ian’s gave away 1,057 free slices in their store and delivered more than 300 pizzas to the Capitol itself.

By 2 p.m. local time Sunday, they’d given away 351 slices and sent countless other full pies to the rotunda, where protesters have been gathering since well before noon. As a few locals stood waiting for their slices, an Ian’s staffer went to the chalkboard hanging behind the register and wrote, “Turkey” in big block letters and co-workers expressed a sense of disbelief.

“I don’t think we started it,” said Ryan O’Connor, a sophomore at a local technical school who works the register at Ian’s. “We made a post to our Facebook page because of the volume of calls we already had been getting unprompted.”

O’Connor said Ian’s got its first call Thursday when a mother of a University of Wisconsin student called and offered to donate $200 to help feed the people her daughter told her had flooded the Capitol. Since then, the outpouring of money from all over the world has put the pizza-makers into overdrive.

The blackboard behind the counter lists the “countries donating” as “Korea, Finland, New Zealand, Egypt, Denmark, Australia, US, Canada, Germany, China, England, Netherlands, Turkey, Switzerland, Italy” and has the abbreviations for all 50 states listed below, with donating states circled.

 The Guardian

Qatar-Gulf deal forces expulsion of Muslim Brotherhood leaders
Move comes under heavy pressure from Saudi Arabia, UAE and other neighbours, with threat posed by Isis used as lever....

Turkish media reported that the country's president, Recep Tayep Erdoğan, had extended a welcome to the exiled leaders.

DefenseNews

Netanyahu: Sunni Arab states "understand that Israel is not their enemy but their ally."

Haaretz

Netanyahu: Don't strengthen Iran to weaken Islamic State

The logical strategy would be to use the divide between Turkey and the Gulf states by offering qualified support to the Brothers, then to pressure Erdogan to staunch the flow of fighters going to Syria. But instead of siding with Sunni and Shiite conservatives -the MB, Turkey, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, all of whom have some relation to democratic politics- against sectarian extremists, we're backing extremists, and monarchists, against their own and hoping our allies are as serious as we are. And of course they're not. People I follow on twitter are banging their heads against the nearest wall, in awe without shock. US policy is nothing if not predictable.

WaPo

For a long time, Western and Arab states supported the Free Syrian Army not only with training but also with weapons and other materiel. The Islamic State commander, Abu Yusaf, added that members of the Free Syrian Army who had received training — from the United States, Turkey and Arab military officers at an American base in Southern Turkey — have now joined the Islamic State. “Now many of the FSA people who the West has trained are actually joining us,” he said, smiling.

AP

...The prosecution is asking that al-Nimr be executed and crucified. In Saudi Arabia, most death sentences are carried out by beheading. Crucifixion in this context would mean that the body and head would then be put on display.

Such a punishment is rare in the kingdom and reserved for only the most serious crimes. It is meant as a warning to others.

The 54-year-old cleric is a longtime critic of Saudi Arabia's treatment of its Shiite minority and is revered among many young Shiites. He led Shiite protests in 2011 in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province and openly criticized the Sunni government of Bahrain's handling of Shiite protests there.

The Saudis have executed 19 people since August 4th, at least 34 this year and at least 78 last year.

The music is annoying. This is silent

Below from last year The music in the MB film doesn't bother me so much. It's manipulative, art is by definition, but the film is full of details, and camera motion that plays against the generalizing tone of the music. The difference between "manipulative" and "cheap"- a fine line. See also the following post. [link fixed]


War as "cinema", a film by the victims of a crime: the final destruction of a MB protest camp by the military.  Graphic.

Without music or post-production (color)

#Furguson 

@AntonioFrench

The Wisconsin protests were more interesting and more important than Occupy Wall St.

Egypt supports Wisconsin

2011

Moretti has become Bourdieu as parody: from the sociologist as data scientist of culture, to the librarian as scientist of filing systems. The rise of anti-humanism is the return of the moralizing petit bourgeois, mocking the pretensions of poetry and literature and defending rules as rules, even now the strictures of anarchism. Back again to Aaron Swartz and Kroeber's daughter.

Moretti, Bourdieu and Kraftwerk, who had a sense self-awareness and thus irony.

"I love the melancholy poetry of reactionary homosexual Fordist anti-humanism, even as I understand that it's founded in pain and self-hatred."

Klub Kid Kommandos I'm alone. I'm everyone.

Daniel Davies on Israel. And Cory Robin comments without realizing what he's taking part in.
You're either in favor of equal rights for Palestinians in Israel, or you're not. The reason for the endless arguments is that friends are implicated: Zionism logically -irrefutably- is bigotry, but "my friends cannot be bigots", because "I can't be a bigot", so Zionism cannot be bigotry.

It comes down to self-preservation, the preservation of self-image. To challenge that is to challenge the logic of individualism, the intellectual and moral primacy of the individual consciousness, to accept the primacy of relations: the primacy of culture.

Individualists cannot admit to fundamental error without undermining everything they stand for.

The thread has dissolved into discussion of vanguardism. It would be fun if they'd let me post, but they won't. John Brown was a vanguardist, Martin Luther King was not. The Wisconsin protests were not vanguardist. Many defenders of the Occupy movement use the rhetoric of vanguardism. The Muslim Brotherhood is vanguardist, but the protests before, and again now are a mix. Israel was founded on vanguardism. All very complex, and all very interesting, but mediocrity is mediocrity.

...but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Bassem Youssef: "I criticized the MB Gov for thirty episodes and they didn't stop me. The current  government stopped me after one."
---

A reminder of the history of discussion of academic freedom at CT.

Farrell

I’ve suggested that academic freedom is a good thing on pragmatic grounds, but also made clear that it fundamentally depends on public willingness to delegate some degree of self-governance to the academy. If the public decides that academic freedom isn’t working out in terms of the goods it provides, then too bad for academic freedom. 

Rauchway

If Kramer’s report is accurate, you can see why the Columbia faculty got frustrated. They wanted Bollinger to offer a traditional defense of academic freedom, which goes something like this: Academic freedom predates free speech…. 

[Perhaps Bollinger] knows the history and sources of academic freedom, but he thinks it uncongenial to assert them in this anti-elitist day and age. ...

Bertram on free speech. (some duplication from the link above). All repeats of repeats.

The right frame, in my view, is to think of the state as “we, the people” and to ask what conditions need to be in place for the people, and for each citizen, to play their role in effective self-government. Once you look at things like that then various speech restrictions naturally suggest themselves.

A confused mess.

https://twitter.com/PatrickKingsley/status/405736305641795584

For holding balloons

partial repeats (recent posts)
Three good films, and one lousy one (it's at the bottom). Three honest films, and one dishonest one (same order). more later, maybe.

Context I guess I shouldn't be amazed at the response to the Banksy video. I'd been told that  Karl Sharro and Paul Woodward were sophisticated observers.  My last comment at Woodward's page.

Is it morally responsible to romanticize a civil war as a “revolution” when the most powerful forces on the side you’re defending are clearly far more nihilist than the joker you find so offensive?"

Banksy:


The Mosireen Collective


The Muslim Brotherhood as filmmakers. The final destruction of a MB protest camp by the military. Graphic.


An American adventurer

MOSIREEN

War as "cinema", a film by the victims of a crime: the final destruction of a MB protest camp by the military.  Graphic.

Without music or post-production (color)

The Killing Days
and below

Today in Egypt, supporters of a deposed president who has not been seen or heard from in twenty-one days spend some of their time holding “parliamentary” sessions in a small mosque events hall, while the leader of the Armed Forces, in all his medaled glory, calls on the general public to hold protests to authorize the army to fight violence and terrorism.

Sarah Carr, in Jadaliyya

July 10: Criticism of  Bassem Youssef for defending the coup.

July 16th: Youssef in Arabic, translated here.

My dear anti-Brotherhood liberal, allow me to remind you that just a few weeks ago you were desperately complaining about how grim the future looked, but now that you have been “relieved” of them you have become a carbon copy of their fascism and discrimination. You could respond by saying that they deserve it; that they supported the security forces and used them to overpower you, to cheat and spread rumors and widen sectarian strife. But is that really your argument? Have you made of their lowly ways a better alternative for you than abiding by the principles you have stood by for so long? They lost their moral compass a long time ago- do you want to follow suit?

He's good.

Church lady speaks

Events have been moving very fast in Egypt– and they continue to do so. Right about now, longtime ‘liberal’ icon Mohamed ElBaradei is being sworn in as PM of the new, coup-birthed order in Cairo. (Update: Or not… )
My instincts from the beginning were to be very wary of the ‘popular’ movement that started gathering in large numbers on Cairo’s streets last weekend. Yes, I knew that the youthful-idealist movement Tamarrod had gathered large numbers of signatures on their ‘Recall the president’ petition (though the real number of genuine, unique signatories will never be known.) Yes, I knew that the elected Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, and his government had made many, very serious mis-steps throughout their 12 months in office. Several of my friends have expressed great public enthusiasm about the popular, anti-Morsi movement.

But still.

Still, there were always many indications that this ‘popular movement’ was not all it was pretending to be. There was evidence of it being connected to a deliberate, lengthy, and well-funded campaign of defamation against Morsi, as Issandr Amrani has well documented. There was evidence of significant funding for the ‘popular’ movement, whose bilingual laser lightshows, fireworks displays, etc.,took a page right out of the theatrics  of the (also Saudi- and U.S.-backed) March 14 movement in Lebanon… And when, after the coup, the supply of gasoline and fuel oil suddenly resumed, it seemed very clear that the military-industrial complex in Egypt had previously been hoarding supplies to sow nationwide eco-social mayhem, in a page right out of the anti-Mossadegh coup of 1953.

I recall the discussion that Bill the spouse and I had with longtime MB spokesman Dr. Esam El-Erian in Cairo in June 2011, when he warned: “Without a change in the policies of Saudi Arabia, these current revolutions won’t succeed… In Egypt, Saudi Arabia is the main force of counter-revolution.” more

["Bill the spouse"]

AA

Is there any question about it? The liberal-Nasserist-AUC Leftist-Fulul opposition in Egypt has proven to be more undemocratic than the Ikhwan.

No question.

7/04 AA again

Question
Will Bassem Youssef be allowed to mock the new president and Sisi?

Press freedoms in Egypt
A comrade from Egypt writes to me: it seems that people under the Ikhwan rule (during Morsi's tenure as bad as it was) were able to insult them and attack them and mock them, but that you can't do that to the new regime now. From bad to worse.

Repeating what I wrote on fb:
Morsi blew it. Erdogan was smarter. In Egypt liberals won; democracy lost; liberalism itself is set back. The Saudis and the Israelis breathe sighs of relief. The clock keeps ticking.