zenpundit.com » 2012 » July

Archive for July, 2012

Life imitates art, or vice versa?

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

[ by Charles Cameron — burqas and veiled threats, Martha Nussbaum, virtual reality ]
.

I believe the photo is from Dubai, the cartoon is by New Zealand’s Malcolm Evans, and all sorts of things are going on when we put the two of them together, thus:

**

For a start, the photographer presumably saw the same thing with his eyes and through his lens that the cartoonist saw in the mind’s eye, and then on paper. Who knows, one of them may have seen the other’s work, and that could have been what triggered their interest in capturing the same effect.

Call that the problem of simultaneous, independent vs sequential, causally connected origination. It’s a fascinating issue in archetypal psychology and cultural anthropology…

Then there’s the juxtaposition of the two images, and the fact of their close similarities and differences. Apart from the obvious difference of media, there’s the neat difference that the women in the photo reality might be thinking roughly the thoughts attributed to them in the cartoon, we’ll never know because thoughts are private — but the cartoon reality adds a “virtual” layer of text to the image, so the women’s “thoughts” and their parallelisms and oppositions are no longer tacit.

But then — hey, those two sets of thought are juxtaposed, just as the two styles of clothing are — so each of the two images I’ve juxtaposed is itself a carefully-executed juxtaposition, artfully conceived, and revealing by comparing and contrasting.

Each of those two images is a Sembl move.

And we haven’t even begun to talk about the issue of burqas and veils — or bikinis and short short skirts — yet.

**

But this post is really my oblique way of introducing Martha Nussbaum‘s book, The New Religious Intolerance, which grew out of her column on veils and burqas — and tummy tucks and breast implants — Veiled threats, on the NY Times Opinionator blog.

I’d love to review it. Will I ever even find time to read it?

**

Veils worn by nuns, Muslims, ninjas — and everybody in the Windy City in December. Circumcision in Islam and Judaism, metzitzah b’peh — and various forms of female genital mutilation around the world. Prayer in schools, other people’s prayers in school. Peyote and wine as taboos, as sacraments. Pork and beef, pigs and cows. Kosher, halal, voodoo — and Socrates sacrificing a cock to Asclepius…

This business of religion and society is a subtle, multi-faceted business.

**

**

My sympathies tend to go with whoever wants to wear whatever. But then I tell myself, I have different body parts, and they have different preferences.

Perhaps more accurately — and certainly more metaphorically — I might say that I am part-angel, part-beast.

Either way, I too contain multitudes.

Anne-Marie Slaughter on Twitter as “your private CNN”

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

[ by Charles Cameron — importance of social media ]
.

h/t @caidid — on Twitter, naturally!

That’s one remarkable sentence

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

[ by Charles Cameron — an expat’s nostalgia ]
.

While the eye reads the letters of a text the mind’s eye is forming images, and some of them can be startling. From today’s (UK) Metro:

Residents yesterday lost their High Court battle to prevent surface-to-air missiles being deployed on the roof of their apartment block.

**

But we don’t need to use our imaginations: the BBC has filmed the building, and the Telegraph has photographed the missiles

**

Taking a look at the BBC’s brief video of the apartments (screen-shot: upper image above) I’m reminded of the British poet John Betjeman‘s famous 1937 lines about a dreadful (from his pastoral point of view) English town whose name, “Slough”, rhymes with “plow” rather than “rough”:

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.

I’m sure, though, that the residents of Slough didn’t appreciate that particular poem, and the people who live in those apartments may curse them at times, but they almost certainly love them too — those apartments are their homes.

**

Tenant: But, but — an Englishman’s home is his castle!
High Court: Precisely — and we’re requisitioning the battlements for our archers.

**

Sigh. Ah well, we survived the Blitz.

A chilling reminder

Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

[ by Charles Cameron — Marisa Urgo on Zawahiri ]
.

I have long been familiar with the second quote in this pair, the one by Anais Nin, and regard it as one of the touchstones of my understanding of the creative process. Anais Nin is exactly right in thinking that in terms of the arts, it is the deeply felt personal detail that profoundly touches the artist’s audience, and thus becomes universal.

It was therefore with quite a shock of recognition that I read Marisa Urgo‘s latest post in her series on Zawahiri‘s Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet. If Zawahiri’s spiritual autobiography draws this sort of response from an analyst giving it a close reading, it’s likely something we should be paying attention to.

.

.

Marisa’s series thus far can be read in reverse order here.

It Seems the Oligarchs Distrust their own Creepy-state

Tuesday, July 10th, 2012

I previously made note of the emergence of an authoritarian Creepy-state element in American government, enjoying bipartisan popularity with this era’s predominantly Boomer elite politicians, CEOs and academic activists. Largely because this growing surveillance state is directed at controlling the rest of us and eroding the democratic and legal accountability of a self-imagined superclass.

Here’s a new (but unsurprising) wrinkle. The political-bureaucratic folks quietly building this incipient machinery of coercion already distrust and fear the men and women who are employed to run it. Evidently, the Rise of the Praetorian Class theory has been widely read.

US spy agency accused of illegally collecting personal data

WASHINGTON — One of the nation’s most secretive intelligence agencies is pressuring its polygraphers to obtain intimate details of the private lives of thousands of job applicants and employees, pushing the ethical and legal boundaries of a program that’s designed instead to catch spies and terrorists.

The National Reconnaissance Office is so intent on extracting confessions of personal or illicit behavior that officials have admonished polygraphers who refused to go after them and rewarded those who did, sometimes with cash bonuses, a McClatchy Newspapers investigation found.

The disclosures include a wide range of behavior and private thoughts such as drug use, child abuse, suicide attempts, depression and sexual deviancy. The agency, which oversees the nation’s spy satellites, records the sessions that were required for security clearances and stores them in a database.

Even though it’s aggressively collecting the private disclosures, when people confess to serious crimes such as child molestation they’re not always arrested or prosecuted.

“You’ve got to wonder what the point of all of this is if we’re not even going after child molesters,” said Mark Phillips, a veteran polygrapher who resigned from the agency in late May after, he says, he was retaliated against for resisting abusive techniques. “This is bureaucracy run amok. These practices violate the rights of Americans, and it’s not even for a good reason.”

The agency refused to answer McClatchy’s questions about its practices. However, it’s acknowledged in internal documents that it’s not supposed to directly ask more personal questions but says it legally collects the information when people spontaneously confess, often at the beginning of the polygraph test.

Even though it is against the law as well as internal regulations, the NRO management have given themselves the green light in a self-investigation to keep doing it to their own employees and anybody going through a security clearance background investigation – a vast number of people, many of whom have or will someday have incredibly sensitive positions in the defense, intelligence and national security communities.

After a legal review of Phillips’ assertions, the agency’s assistant general counsel, Mark Land, concluded in April that it did nothing wrong. “My opinion, based on all of the facts, is that management’s action is legally supportable and corrective action is not required,” he wrote.

But McClatchy’s review of hundreds of documents – including internal policy documents, memos and agency emails – indicates that the National Reconnaissance Office is pushing ethical and possibly legal limits by:

-Establishing a system that tracks the number of personal confessions, which then are used in polygraphers’ annual performance reviews.

-Summoning employees and job applicants for multiple polygraph tests to ask about a wide array of personal behavior.

-Altering results of the tests in what some polygraphers say is an effort to justify more probing of employees’ and applicants’ private lives.

Read the rest here.
.
The charitable explanation is that all this is bureaucratic overreach motivated by tiny empire building and budget-padding in the age of  austerity, where cybersecurity is one of the few “growth” areas of discretionary spending for senior bureaucrats to pursue.
.
The cynical explanation is that these are blackmail files being compiled systematically and deliberately; to be used later to compel IC/DoD/DHS/DoJ employees to stick with an agency party line, intimidate and punish whistleblowers or use their official positions to engage in illegal misconduct to benefit politically influential VIPs. Like harassing American citizens or journalists critical of an agency or administration policy or special interests.
.
There’s few good reasons for the government to do this – and those few are all narrowly related to genuine and specific security concerns we have had to live with since WWII – but many bad ones.

Switch to our mobile site