Climate Change Without the Spin:
An Independent Summary for Policymakers of the New IPCC Report
Protesting against the separation fence, "Anarchists Against the Wall" activists blocked the entrance to one of Tel Aviv's main streets, Rothschild Boulevard, with barbwire and a sign saying "restricted military zone" on Saturday.
This is the anarchists' second Tel Aviv protest aimed at demonstrating the daily difficulties the separation fence places on residents of the Palestinian Territories.
The demonstration did not last long, and since the act was illegal, the anarchists refused to reveal their identities for fear of getting arrested.
Anarchists in Tel Aviv Saturday (Photo courtesy of activestills.org)
SeeSoldiers interviewed across east Baghdad, home to more than half the city's 8 million people, said the violence is so out of control that while a surge of 21,500 more American troops may momentarily suppress it, the notion that U.S. forces can bring lasting security to Iraq is misguided. Soldiers such as Hardy must contend not only with an escalating civil war between Iraq's Sunni and Shiite Muslims, but also with insurgents on both sides who target U.S. forces.
Officials estimate that 500,000 or more Iraqis have been forced into the limbo of displacement inside their country since February 2006, when the bombing of a Shiite shrine in the city of Samarra accelerated ongoing sectarian violence and localized ethnic cleansing.
The forced migrations are especially prevalent in Baghdad, a once-mixed city that is now fragmenting into segregated enclaves.
"Both (sects) are involved in the game," said Ali Shalan Mohan, a department director in the Iraqi government's Ministry of Displacement and Migration, who is himself displaced.
Iraqis are fleeing at a rate that could exceed 1,000 per day, according to some estimates.
In a country of about 26 million, more than 1.5 million people have been displaced, according to the International Organization for Migration, a Geneva-based group that counts displaced Iraqis in the central and southern portion of Iraq (not including the three Kurdish-run provinces). More than 1.2 million Iraqis, by most estimates, have fled Iraq to neighboring countries since 2003.
The Iraqi government reported a much higher count as of mid-January, saying 560,000 had fled their homes in 2006 — close to what the United Nations has estimated.
But Sunnis especially fear registering as displaced with a government that is dominated by Shiite parties with links to Shiite militias.
"People won't register with this government because they think the government is part of the displacement," said Samir al-Hayat, 30, from a mixed Sunni-Shiite family that is displaced yet unregistered.
Last summer, American troops in eastern Baghdad said Shiite gunmen were suspected of forcing mass evacuations of Sunni residents so they could give their homes to Shiites displaced from other areas of the city.
The U.S. military drive to train and equip Iraq's security forces has unwittingly strengthened anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, which has been battling to take over much of the capital city as American forces are trying to secure it.
U.S. Army commanders and enlisted men who are patrolling east Baghdad, which is home to more than half the city's population and the front line of Sadr's campaign to drive rival Sunnis from their homes and neighborhoods, said Sadr's militias had heavily infiltrated the Iraqi police and army units that they've trained and armed.
Domestic Security Forces Face Major Challenges
Even after the Defense Department took over this training in 2004 and invested more resources, it was clear that the U.S. military did "not have the right experience or personnel to provide the unique training that the Iraqi Police Service needs."
On January 28, Diyala Governate police chief Ghanim al-Qureyshi announced that 1,500 local police officers had been dismissed for fleeing when the city of Ba'qubah was attacked by Sunni insurgents last November. He added that Ba'qubah Mayor Khalid al-Sinjari had been dismissed amid suspicions that he had collaborated with Sunni insurgents.
Iran censors feminist blogs and arrests the bloggers. Outrageous.
Five Arab nations share economic freedom awards during ceremony in Beirut
News Release
Despite the current troubles in Lebanon, we thought it important to proceed with the
meeting to show our support for Lebanon and the region, and the role that economic
freedom can play in its future,” said Fred McMahon, director of The Fraser Institute’s
Centre for Globalization Studies.
1) Lean Government Award: Lebanon
This category examines various measures to determine whether the government sector is inappropriately large, crowding out personal choice with government decisions.
3)Sound Money Award: Lebanon
This measures the extent to which a nation’s currency is sound and holds its value over time.
Data for the Economic Freedom of the Arab World Report (2006)
Ethanol's boosters, led primarily by ADM, go to great lengths to screen the
public's knowledge of the facts behind this taxpayer-funded rip-off.
Justifications for the subsidy are draped in histrionics, flawed research
and/or demogogic appeals to patriotism (i.e. "No American soldiers should
die for foreign oil") --- Who would disagree with that ---
but who looks behind the statement to discover its falsehoods?ADM's de facto monopoly in ethanol and its subjugating influence across wide
swaths of our agro-food system has been accomplished stealthily over decades
and is currently enforced by several largely hidden (but interlocking)
realities:
(1) political contributions and placement of ADM-approved toadies at all
levels of
government, particularly USDA and Congress,
(2) a large phalanx of controlled trade associations, commodity groups, and
related foundations at national, state and local levels and
(3) controlling influence in important media sectors through stock ownership
of newspapers, advertising and holding companies.Let's illustrate the last point --- Have you been watching the public
destruction of Conrad Black, erstwhile chairman of Hollinger International,
and a member of British House of Lords? Hollinger, which controlled, among
other assets, The Chicago Sun Times, The London Daily Telegraph and dozens
of smaller newspapers, began imploding shortly after ADM's chairman emeritus
Dwayne O. Andreas and another longtime ADM director, Robert Strauss,
resigned their board seats at Hollinger in early 2003.Other ADM directors and toadies, including former Ambassador Richard Burt and former Illinois governor James Thompson, continued serving on Hollinger's board and helped spark an internal investigation, brought in a former SEC chairman for window dressing and dumped Black amid a swirl of nasty allegations. Having orchestrated Black's ouster, by exposing audits
and other internal revelations of indefensible corporate greed, it would
appear the "Pot (Andreas) can call the kettle (Black)" and get away unscathed --- while simultaneously riding the public's post-Enron indignation.
See:
Habermas draws a distinction between two types of action: communicative action, where the agents base their actions on (and coordinate their interactions by) their mutual recognition of validity-claims; and instrumental/strategic action, where the coordination of actions is linked to the their successful completion. Habermas argues that instrumental and strategic actions are (conceptually and in reality) always parasitic on communicative action. Hence instrumental and strategic actions alone cannot form a stable system of social action.
Habermas’s conceptual distinction between communicative action and instrumental action is paralleled by his distinction between lifeworld and system in his social ontology: his description of the nature of social being. The lifeworld concerns the lived experience of the context of everyday life in which interactions between individuals are coordinated through speech and validity-claims. Systems are real patterns of instrumental action instantiated by money (the capitalist economy) and power (the administrative state).
A central issue in Habermas's effort to sustain the Enlightenment project is the problem of relativism. This problem underlies several postmodern critiques of modernity, the Enlightenment, and Habermas, and is thus a useful first path into Habermas's thought.
The Enlightenment project of justifying democratic polity (and thus justifying emancipation from non-democratic polities - e.g., the prevailing monarchies of the time) rests on these key conceptions:
1) however diverse cultures and individuals may vary from one another in terms of religious convictions, traditions, sentiments, etc. - reason (at least in potential - a potential that must be developed by education) stands as a universally shared capacity of humanity;
2) such reason is characterized first of all as an autonomy or freedom - a freedom which, for such central figures as Locke and Kant, is capable of giving itself its own law;
3) just as this reason seems capable of discerning universal laws in the domain of mathematics and the natural sciences (witness the success of the Copernican Revolution and Newton) - so reason, it is hoped, is capable of discerning universal laws and norms in the moral and political domains.
As an example of such a universal norm: if I am to exercise my freedom by choosing my own goals and projects - this freedom requires that others respect these choices by not attempting to override them and make use of me for their own purposes. (In Kantian terms, others must never treat me simply as a means, but always as an end.)
But if I logically require others to respect my freedom as an autonomous rationality, then insofar as I acknowledge others as autonomous rationalities - reciprocity demands that I respect others' freedom as well.
This norm of respect then issues in the political demand for democracy: only democracies, as resting on the [free and rational] consent of the governed, thereby respect and preserve the fundamental humanity of its citizens ( i.e., precisely their central character as rational freedoms). [This argument, initially launched by John Locke, finds its way into Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and from there into the arguments for women's emancipation in writers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the arguments for civil rights as articulated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail.]
On The Living Wage/Guaranteed IncomeTo give this idea a more radical twist, we could endorse a general, state-guaranteed citizen income, as originally proposed by Andre Gorz and now backed by Claus Offe, among others. Severing the link between income and employment would place the current "economic society"--now centered on the traditional role of full-time wage labor-on a new footing and create an equivalent for the disintegrating welfare system. This "basic income" would absorb the capitalist world market's destructive impact on those who slide into the increasingly "superfluous" population. Such a radical redistribution program requires, however, a change in deep-rooted values that will be difficult to orchestrate. Also, under present conditions of global competition, we might wonder how the program could be financed within the budgetary limits of individual nation states, since the target income would have to be above the lowest level of welfare support.
The globalization of the economy ends the history of the welfare-state compromise. While it by no means ideally solved capitalism's inherent problems, this compromise had at least succeeded in keeping social costs within accepted limits. Despite the bureaucratization and "normalization" so convincingly criticized by Michel Foucault, the scale of social disparities under this compromise was limited sufficiently to avoid the manifest repudiation of the normative promises of the democratic and liberal tradition.
First of all, the word "secularization" has a juridical meaning that refersThe expanded concept of tolerance does not remain restricted to the sphere of religion but can be generally extended to tolerance of others who think differently in any way. Within today’s pluralist societies where the traditions of various linguistic and cultural communities come together, tolerance is always necessary "where ways of life challenge judgements in terms of both existential relevance and claims to truth and rightness" (J. Habermas)
to the forcible appropriation of church property by the secular state. This
meaning has since been extended to the emergence of cultural and societal
modernism in general. Since then, the word "secularization" has been
associated with both of these opposed judgments, whether it is the
successful taming of ecclesiastical authority by worldly power that is being
emphasized or rather the act of unlawful appropriation.
According to the first interpretation, religious ways of thinking and living
have been replaced by reason-based and consequently superior equivalents.
According to the second, modern modes of thinking and living are to be
regarded as the illegitimate spoils of conquest. The "replacement" model
lends a progressive-optimistic meaning to the act of deconsecration, whereas
the "expropriation" model connotes theoretically-conceived corruption of a
rootless modernity.
But I think both interpretations make the same mistake. They both consider
secularization as a kind of zero-sum game between, on one hand, the
productive powers of science and technology harnessed by capitalism and, on
the other, the tenacious powers of religion and the church. This image no
longer fits a post-secular society that posits the continued existence of
religious communities within a continually secularizing society. And most
of all, this too-narrow view overlooks the civilizing role of democratically
enlightened common sense, which proceeds along its own track as an equal
third partner amid the murmurs of cultural conflict between science and
religion.
>From the standpoint of the liberal state, of course, religious communities
are entitled to be called "reasonable" only if they renounce the use of
violence as a means of propagating the truths of their faith. This
understanding stems from a threefold reflection on the role of the faithful
within a pluralistic society. First of all, the religious conscience must
handle the encounter with other confessions and other religions cognitively.
Second, it must accede to the authority of science, which holds a social
monopoly on knowledge. Finally, it must participate in the premises of a
constitutional state, which is based on a non-sacred concept of morality.
Without this reflective "thrust," monotheisms within ruthlessly modernizing
societies develop a destructive potential. The phrase "reflective thrust,"
of course, can give the false impression of being something that is
one-sided and close-ended. The reality, however, is that this work of
reflection in the face of any newly emerging conflict is a process that runs
its course through the public spaces of democracy.
As soon as an existentially relevant question, such as biotechnology,
becomes part of the political agenda, the citizens, both believers and
non-believers, will press upon each other their ideologically impregnated
world-views and so will stumble upon the harsh reality of ideological
pluralism. If they learn to deal with this reality without violence and
with an acceptance of their own fallibility, they will come to understand
what the secular principles of decision-making written into the Constitution
mean in a post-secular society. In other words, the ideologically neutral
state does not prejudice its political decisions in any way toward either
side of the conflict between the rival claims of science and religious
faith. The political reason of the citizenry follows a dynamic of
secularization only insofar as it maintains in the end product an equal
distance from vital traditions and ideological content. But such a state
retains a capacity to learn only to the extent that it remains osmotically
open, without relinquishing its independence, to both science and religion.
Of course, common sense itself is also full of illusions about the world and
must let itself be enlightened without reservation by the sciences. But the
scientific theories that impinge on the world of life leave the framework of
our everyday knowledge essentially untouched. If we learn something new
about the world and about ourselves as beings in the world, the content of
our self-understanding changes. Copernicus and Darwin revolutionized the
geocentric and anthropocentric worldviews. But the destruction of the
astronomical illusion that the stars revolve around the earth had less
effect on our lives than did the biological disillusionment over the place
of mankind in the natural order. It appears that the closer scientific
knowledge gets to our body, the more it disturbs our self-understanding.
Research on the brain is teaching us about the physiology of our
consciousness. But does this change that intuitive sense of responsibility
and accountability that accompanies all of our actions?
Multiculturalism and the Liberal State
My article, n1 which provides the basis for our discussion, is a response
to my friend Charles Taylor's The Politics of Recognition. n2 The
controversial issue is briefly this: Should citizens' identities as
members of ethnic, cultural, or religious groups publicly matter,
and if so, how can collective identities make a difference within
the frame of a constitutional democracy? Are collective identities
and cultural memberships politically relevant, and if so, how can
they legitimately affect the distribution of rights and the recognition
of legal claims? There are many aspects to multiculturalism, but the
present debate focuses narrowly on normative questions of political
and legal theory. Without any attempt to summarize the arguments of
the book, I would like to remind you of the two opposed answers to
the question at hand - the liberal and the communitarian positions
- and of my own response, which is critical of both. n3
I cannot go into the details of the argumentation here, but it might
help just to mention both the philosophical and the political contexts
in which my response to Taylor was embedded.
As to philosophical themes, those familiar with discussions in political theory will have discovered two controversial issues at stake. First, I am defending liberals against the communitarian critique with regard to the concept of the "self." The individualistic approach to a theory of rights does not necessarily imply an atomistic, disembodied, and desocialized concept of the person. The legal person is, of course, an artificial construct. Modern legal orders presuppose abstract subjects as carriers of those rights of which they are composed. These artificial persons are not identical with natural persons, who are individuated by their unique life histories. But legal persons, too, should and can be constructed as socialized individuals. They are members of a community of legal consociates who are supposed to recognize each other as free and equal. The equal respect required from legal persons pertains, however, also to the context of those intersubjective relationships which are constitutive for their identities as natural persons.
Together with the communitarians I am, on the other hand, critical of the liberal assumption that human rights are prior to popular sovereignty. The addressees of law must be in a position to see themselves at the same time as authors of those laws to which they are subject. Human rights may not just be imposed on popular sovereignty as an external constraint. Of course, popular sovereignty must not be able to arbitrarily dispose of human rights either. The two mutually presuppose each other. The solution to this seeming paradox is that human rights must be conceived in such a way that they are enabling rather than constraining conditions for democratic self-legislation.
Turning to political themes: The idea of a "struggle for recognition" stems from Hegel's Phenomenology. n8 From this perspective, we can discover similarities among different but related phenomena: feminism, nationalism, conflict of cultures, besides the particular issue of multiculturalism. All these phenomena have in common the political struggle for the recognition of suppressed collective identities. This good is different from other collective goods. It cannot be substituted for by generalized social rewards (income, leisure time, working conditions, etc.) which are the objects of the usual distribution conflicts in the welfare state. But those struggles for recognition, fought in various forms of identity politics, are also different in many other respects. One such aspect is law: Since of these groups only women and ethnic minorities have been recognized as objects of constitutional protection, only feminist and mul- [*853] ticulturalist claims can be, at least in principle, settled within the frame of the constitutional state.
Finally, an example. The immediate political context in Germany at the time of my article was the debate on "asylum," which in fact was about immigration. Applying the principles above, one can arrive at the following conclusions: First, there are good legal reasons for defending a right to political asylum. n9 On the other hand, there are only moral reasons, albeit rather strong ones, for establishing a liberal immigration policy. The claim to immigration and citizenship in the receiving country is a moral claim but, unlike political asylum, not a legal right.
Second, immigrants should be obliged to assent to the principles of the constitution as interpreted within the scope of the political culture: that is, the ethical-political self-understanding of the citizenry of the receiving country. Once they become citizens themselves, they in turn get a voice in public debates, which may then shift the established inerpretation of the constitutional principles. The obligation to accept the political culture may not, however, extend to assimilation to the way of life of the majority culture. A legally required political socialization may not have an impact on other aspects of the collective identity of the immigrants' culture of origin.
