Liberal Values in the Age of Interdependence Logos. In 1976, the great pragmatic American liberal James MacGregor Burns, who was a student of the Roosevelt Era, was elected (rather surprisingly) as president of the American Political Science Association. He asked two young scholars on the left to organize his annual program for the 1976 American Political Science Association, which coincided with the American bicentennial. The two young scholars he asked were Frances Fox Piven and myself. That was the first time we worked together, and I’ve been so pleased to know her all these years since. We’ve had many areas of agreement, and ample disagreement too. In taking up issues facing liberalism today, we need not focus on liberal values, because they haven’t changed. Nor need we divert ourselves with nomenclature. We do need to address our altered realities, however. The Marx no one wants to talk about today once minted a notable war cry: “workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.”
Inside the strange Hollywood scam that spread chaos across the Middle East | Max Blumenthal. Did an inflammatory anti-Muslim film trailer that appeared spontaneously on YouTube prompt the attack that left four US diplomats dead, including US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens? American officials have suggested that the assault was pre-planned, allegedly by of one of the Jihadist groups that emerged since the Nato-led overthrow of Libya's Gaddafi regime.
So even though the deadly scene in Benghazi may not have resulted directly from the angry reaction to the Islamophobic video, the violence has helped realize the apocalyptic visions of the film's backers. Produced and promoted by a strange collection of rightwing Christian evangelicals and exiled Egyptian Copts, the trailer was created with the intention of both destabilizing post-Mubarak Egypt and roiling the US presidential election. As a consultant for the film named Steve Klein said: "We went into this knowing this was probably going to happen. " Who was Bacile? For Sadek, the chaos was an encouraging development. Freedom & Diversity: A Liberal Pentagram for Living Together by Timothy Garton Ash. Europe’s Angry Muslims: The Revolt of the Second Generation by Robert S. Leiken Oxford University Press, 354 pp., $27.95 Muslims in Europe: A Report on 11 EU Cities by the Open Society Institute The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims: The State’s Role in Minority Integration by Jonathan Laurence Princeton University Press, 366 pp., $80.00; $29.95 (paper) The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age by Martha C.
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 285 pp., $26.95 Immigrant Nations by Paul Scheffer, translated from the Dutch by Liz Waters. Julian Assange and the dark art of diplomatic communication: it's not what you say, it's what they hear. Amidst all the kerfuffle surrounding the unhappy suggestion put to the Ecuadorean government by the British government that they might remove the Ecuador Embassy’s diplomatic status and extract suspected sex-offender Julian Assange, there was some confusion over how that "threat" had been communicated. Was it by letter, or by some sort of speaking-note? And does it matter anyway? It was in fact a speaking-note. And here is what looks like the real thing itself. It’s not as easy as you might think to convey a message to another government accurately. Diplomats have mulled over these questions for a good 800 years and more.
One top-level way to send a message is indeed to use the form of a letter. But that is not foolproof. Thus at the height of the first major post-Cold War spy expulsion drama in Moscow in mid-1996, former KGB chief turned Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov asked HM Ambassador Sir Andrew Wood for advice concerning PM John Major’s letter to President Yeltsin: Evangelists of Democracy. LIKE THE human-rights movement, democracy promotion is a radical project of social and political transformation whose adherents will not or cannot acknowledge either the ideological or the revolutionary character of their enterprise. In this, democracy promotion should be understood as a subset of contemporary liberalism—the only major modern ideology that denies it is an ideology at all. More precisely, it is the end state of human political organization after all the other ideologies have withered away, the future’s moral default position.
To hear Western democracy-promotion activists tell it, when they work to “transition” states from a totalitarian or authoritarian social order to a liberal-democratic one, they are merely hastening the inevitable. There is irony in this proud assertion of openness to new ideas and dismissal of “closed,” undemocratic societies on the grounds that they, as Soros once complained, “claim to be in possession of the ultimate truth.” We’re So Exceptional by Michael Ignatieff.
All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals by David Scheffer Princeton University Press, 533 pp., $35.00 Affirming belief that America is an exceptional nation has become a test of patriotism in American politics. Standing up for America’s right to make its own rules and live its own unique destiny has become an obligatory part of campaign rhetoric at a time when China is on the rise and the American economy is struggling back to its feet.
Barack Obama learned this to his cost in 2009. When asked by a Financial Times journalist whether he believed in American exceptionalism, Obama replied that he believed in it “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Exceptionalist rhetoric is more than a language game for politicians trying to win support from an anxious electorate traversing the dark wood of possible imperial decline. Many observers at the time wondered why he didn’t quit. Letters. In the Battles of SOPA and PIPA, Who Should Control the Internet? Two years earlier, Thackeray had helped the U.S. Secret Service run Operation Sun Devil, one of the first crackdowns on illegal computer hacking. A lot of hackers hated Thackeray, and Dead Addict was not surprised when she responded to his invitation with the words “No. I wouldn’t go to a convention of car thieves, either.”
Hackers are nothing if not persistent, and Thackeray was eventually persuaded to spend a few days in the kiln that is Vegas in July. Every summer, Moss uses Def Con to promote conversation between the Internet’s forces of Order and Disorder. Where Vint Cerf argues that sovereignty lies at the heart of the War for the Internet, Moss—who as a hacker cut his teeth gaining access to systems and information that belonged to others—argues that the heart of the matter may be intellectual property.
This transformation occurred during the same years the Internet became a place to do business. Technical constraints are complicated by politics. One thing is clear. IV. CBC: Dambisa Moyo on her vision for Africa & what's wrong with aid.