BP has been doing its level best to interfere with reporters in the Gulf Coast region to keep them from reporting on what's actually going on down there as clean-up efforts continue.

BP has been striving to keep reporters away from affected areas, put the kibosh on images of the destruction done to area wildlife, hassle local reporters and run off area activists. It has also gone as far as dispatching its own PR staff to masquerade as journalists and report the happy side of this epic disaster.

Naomi Klein: The Real Crime Scene Was Inside the G20 Summit

As thousands protested in the streets of Toronto, inside the G20 summit world leaders agreed to a controversial goal of cutting government deficits in half by 2013.

Sticking the Public With the Bill for the Bankers’ Crisis

My city feels like a crime scene and the criminals are all melting into the night, fleeing the scene. No, I’m not talking about the kids in black who smashed windows and burned cop cars on Saturday.

I’m talking about the heads of state who, on Sunday night, smashed social safety nets and burned good jobs in the middle of a recession. Faced with the effects of a crisis created by the world's wealthiest and most privileged strata, they decided to stick the poorest and most vulnerable people in their countries with the bill.

How Canada made the G20 happen

China, India, Brazil, Mexico – these were obvious choices. So was South Africa, the biggest economy on its continent. But who else?

Thailand was the nexus of the Asian banking crisis, but Indonesia was more influential in the region. Indonesia in; Thailand out. Chile was tempting, because it was democratic and well-run, but Argentina was a bigger player. Argentina got the seat. Saudi Arabia was strategically important and a good friend of the United States. The Saudis would get an invite.

So it went until they had compiled a working list of roughly 20 countries – literally, a back-of-the-envelope blueprint for what would become, today, the most powerful forum on economic and political matters in the world: the G20.

Reading Into Gun Regulations

I'll give the gun-rights supporter on NPR this morning one bit of credit in his comparison of bookstores to gun stores: books can be dangerous.

Books force you to consider different perspectives from your own. They show you worlds you've never been to, create futures that don't exist, stretch and twist and test new ideas and make you consider the fact that you just might be wrong.

The Secret Powers of Time

Del cínico se dice que no cree en la idea de sinceridad. Es decir, el cínico sería alguien que reconociendo lo complejo y voluble de la interioridad humana ha desechado por completo la búsqueda de integridad.

The Black Bloc strategy

The Black Bloc strategy: show up at large demonstrations and attack symbols of capitalism.

Chossudovsky on G8: Austerity = Collapse

Canada fais to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and fails on environmental issues, like protection of lands and resources.

EE UU planta cara a Marruecos y frena la expulsión de los cristianos

Los cinicos: mordaces, divertidos y alegóricos

Los cínicos, aquellos filósofos de la Antigüedad que deafiaban al poder, la moral y las buenas costumbres?

El cínico contemporáneo debería mostrar insolencia frente a todo lo que se engalana con las plumas de lo sagrado: lo social, los dioses, la religión, el poder y las convenciones; desacreditar todo lo que se viste con espíritu de seriedad; desesperar de los lugares comunes. Como sugiere Onfray: “El cínico es un insolente para quien la filosofía es un antídoto contra la perpetua arrogancia de los mediocres”.

“Con dinero se compra una casa, y con tiempo y dedicación se compra la educación”.

Michel Onfray en Las sabidurías de la antigüedad: Hegel “se equivocaba al reducir la filosofía cínica a un revoltijo de anécdotas desprovistas de interés y sentido común”. Otros filósofos alemanes que se refirieron a Diógenes Laercio como “vulgar plagiario” o “miserable compilador”. Otto Flake: “El gran defecto de las cabezas alemanas consiste en que no tienen ningún sentido para la ironía, el cinismo, el desprecio y la burla”.

Más que una escuela filosófica, hay que ver en el cinismo un movimiento intelectual que, reinterpretando la doctrina socrática, acuerda que la vida en civilización es un mal, que la felicidad se encuentra en la naturaleza y en una vida sencilla y frugal. El hombre con menos necesidades es el hombre más libre y a la libertad se llega mediante la transmutación de valores, en la inversión de todo aquello que se encuentra establecido. Por eso llevan como máxima “no ser esclavo de nadie ni de nada en el pequeño universo donde uno halla su lugar”. El cínico detesta los grandes e intrincados discursos, por lo que practica su filosofía mediante juegos de palabras, teatralizaciones, gestos y grandes dosis de humor e ironía. Barbudos y groseros, armados de báculos y alforjas, estos predicadores de último minuto deambulaban por las calles llevando a cabo sus excentricidades. Fundada por Antístenes, el cinismo encuentra formalmente en Diógenes de Sinope su máximo apologeta. El cínico niega los valores de una sociedad que considera hipócrita y reivindica la falta de auténtica libertad y autonomía del individuo frente a la familia, la ciudad y la moral de compromiso.

Gracias a la locuacidad y frescura de estos filósofos hostiles a las convenciones, el consumo y el progreso, la palabra cinismo ha entrado en manuales, tratados y burdeles filosóficos, estableciendo así una importante diferencia con lo que vulgarmente se entiende y asume como tal.

uando el cínico se niega a rendir homenaje a lo respetable, lo que pretende es denunciar la inautenticidad de esa respetabilidadque se acepta más por principios hereditarios, creencias tradicionales y comodidad, que por razonamiento. El cínico buscaba revalorizar los hábitos montado en una moral mínima; pero ante todo, era crítico, austero y anárquico. El cinismo no estaba dirigido a las masas, era sólo patrimonio de unos cuantos audaces marginales

El cínico revela el comportamiento ridículo de los otros: desenmascara supercherías o ironiza ideas que le parecen de dudosa respetabilidad.

A great day for yoga in Toronto

a “Yoga happening.” One of the many small groups of police officers patrolling downtown looked on from a polite distance.

Organizer and yoga instructor J.P. Tamblyn, in sun glasses and blond dreadlocks, says the event, organized like a “flash mob” via Facebook, aims to project a peaceful mood downtown as the G20 summit.

Dan Brown’s novels The Lost Symbol, The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons are filled with conspiracy. But how much of it is based on fact?

Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Peru

Respaldo de destacados miembros de la comunidad academica mundial

Sudáfrica prueba el condón 'atrapa violadores'

Una idea original y sin complicaciones podría acabar pronto con los asaltos sexuales, o al menos hacer que el violador de turno se lo piense dos veces antes de abordar a su víctima. El artilugio, que se acaba de convertir en la última esperanza de los 25 millones de mujeres sudafricanas, es el 'condón femenino con dientes', oficialmente el Rape-aXe, un invento revolucionario que se está poniendo a prueba estos días en el país anfitrión del Mundial de fútbol, uno de los lugares con mayores índices de abusos sexuales del planeta con medio millón de violaciones al año.

He Was Tortured, But He Can't Sue

The Supreme Court declined to hear Maher Arar’s case, conclusively shutting the door on the Canadian citizen’s effort to obtain redress from US officials who stopped him in September 2002 while he was changing planes on his way home to Canada and shipped him instead to Syria, where he was tortured and imprisoned without charges for nearly a year. In so ruling, the Court refused to reconsider the decision of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, sitting en banc, which had ruledin November 2009 that Arar’s case raised too many sensitive issues of national security and confidential information to permit its adjudication in a court of law. If he is to obtain any remedy now, it must come from Congress and the President. The courts have washed their hands of the affair, but that does not mean that it is resolved.

Fighting Talk: The New Propaganda

Journalism has become a linguistic battleground – and when reporters use terms such ‘spike in violence’ or ‘surge’ or ‘settler’, they are playing along with a pernicious game

Following the latest in semantics on the news? Journalism and the Israeli government are in love again. It's Islamic terror, Turkish terror, Hamas terror, Islamic Jihad terror, Hezbollah terror, activist terror, war on terror, Palestinian terror, Muslim terror, Iranian terror, Syrian terror, anti-Semitic terror...

Derechos humanos, mujeres, sociedad, islam, burka

Francia, el burka y los derechos humanos

30 Abr, en Cultura, Internacional, Última Hora, por Escarlata

Todo indica que en poco tiempo Francia aprobará sanciones para aquellas mujeres que usen burka. También se prevé aplicar sanciones, pero más duras, a quienes obliguen a otras personas a usarlo. En el primer caso se prevé una multa de 150 euros y un curso sobre derechos, y en el segundo un año de cárcel y una multa de 15 mil euros.

El fundamento de la medida es lo que puede implicar la ocultación del rostro.

Y aquí tenemos un ejemplo de esas situaciones donde se mezcla la tolerancia por los usos y costumbres de un grupo de personas (en este caso pertenecientes a una religión) y la defensa de los derechos humanos.

Porque lo discutible es hasta que punto quienes deciden ocultar su rostro lo hacen libremente.

La decisión de Francia me parece desacertada en parte. No corresponde la multa, pero si el hacer que la persona tenga un mejor conocimiento de sus derechos, para decidir en libertad.

¿qué significa hoy en día el nacionalismo y para quién?

la incapacidad de los distintos discursos políticos para ofrecer identidades políticas

En América Latina se vislumbra un auge nacionalista y de etnificación del conflicto social a medida que el reino de las ideologías se ha ido desvaneciendo

El nacionalismo fue utilizado como un componente importante del fascismo alemán e italiano y del socialismo soviético. ¿La migración hacia lo étnico y racial hace que deje de ser político en los noventa?

¿cómo ser tolerantes y a la vez imponer la tolerancia?

Arabia Saudita es una monarquía tribal (una encarnación del nacionalismo) y el Islam es el principal instrumento usado por el gobierno para controlar las mentes y los corazones de los ciudadanos sauditas. Los miembros de la familia real se han autodesignado como los protectores de los dos lugares sagrados del Islam, las ciudades de Meca y Medina. De esta manera, dan a entender que nadie puede rebatir su derecho al poder absoluto.

casi 80% del currículo en los colegios consiste de enseñanzas islámicas. En los colegios está prohibido enseñar todo lo que contradiga las enseñanzas del profeta. Las teorias sociales no existen en Arabia Saudita: la psicología, la sociología, las teorias políticas, la filosofía, son por naturaleza cursos que requieren el uso intensivo de las facultades críticas de los estudiantes. Estos cursos simplemente no se ofrecen. El periodismo se limita a repetir lo que el gobierno quiere que sepa la gente. A las investigaciones antigubernamentales las califican como antiislámicas.

Lo que describe Ayaan acerca de Arabia Saudita, guardando las proporciones, tiene mucho en común con el régimen que impera en Cuba.

Las religiones monoteístas son universalistas, y el marxismo es una religión. Funciona igual que una religión, aunque no alcance el ámbito de lo sagrado.

En Cuba el Partido Comunista es un elemento de control de la sociedad, y la verdadera base del poder es el Ministerio del Interior y la Policía política. En Arabia Saudita la policía religiosa cumple ese papel.

En Francia ha estallado un nuevo escándalo porque un alcalde se negó a casar a una pareja cuando la novia rehusó quitarse la burka durante la ceremonia. Se trata de un acto administrativo que requiere que se conozca la identidad de la persona. Igualmente sucede con la fotografía que lleva la tarjeta de identidad. En los hospitales se niegan a ser auscultadas por médicos hombres, están exigiendo la separación entre varones y mujeres en las piscinas públicas. Exigen que las mujeres sean eximidas de las clases de educación física y de biología. Francia ha caído víctima del chantaje por las acusaciones de colonialismo. Muchos comienzan a admitir que es una culpa que deben expiar por haber sido una potencia colonial. Hay hasta quienes han llegado al extremo de defender la práctica de la amputación del clítoris por ser una “práctica ancestral”, cuando según las leyes francesas se le considera un atentado contra la integridad de la persona.

There is little social good in what amounts to criminalizing poverty. It is not that the poor have a right to steal; it is that they have no duty to starve.

I love her but the sex has died

Evolutionary psychology.

Love, sex and masturbation

In Deep Water: A Way of Life in Peril

Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world

The Deepwater Horizon disaster is not just an industrial accident – it is a violent wound inflicted on the Earth itself. In this special report from the Gulf coast, a leading author and activist shows how it lays bare the hubris at the heart of capitalism

BP Is a Corporate Criminal

In April 2010, BP was strutting about in full corporate splendor, showing off the $9 billion in profits that it had soaked up in just the first three months of this year. It was also basking in a corporate re-imaging campaign, depicting itself as a clean-energy pioneer and declaring that BP now stood for "Beyond Petroleum."

From the time it was known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and set out to grab and control the rich petroleum reserves owned by what is now Iran, BP has been a recidivist global criminal. In the past three decades, it grew huge by swallowing such competitors as Standard Oil of Ohio, Amoco and Arco. Along the way, it has been implicated in bribery, overthrowing governments, plunder and money laundering, plus having established one of the worst safety and environmental records in an industry that is notoriously reckless on both counts.

The Center for Public Integrity has revealed that the oil giant's current catastrophic mess should come as no surprise, for it has a long and sorry record of causing calamities. In the last three years, the center says, an astonishing "97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors" came at BP facilities. These included 760 violations rated as "egregious" and "willful." In contrast, the oil company with the second-worst record had only eight such citations.

Eleven oil workers are dead, thousands of Gulf Coast people have had their livelihoods devastated and unfathomable damage is being done to the gulf ecology. Imagine how the authorities would be treating the offender if BP were a person. It would've been put behind bars long ago — if not on death row.

AMERICANS ADDICTION TO OIL (AND CORPORATE DEMOCRATS)

The Gulf and US Oily Campaign-Finance System

BP oil spill continues to flood the Gulf of Mexico. Such an environmental catastrophe might constitute the sort of “creative destruction” that right-wing market fundamentalists love to cite when they defend “free markets” and capitalism.

Creative destruction is the term coined in 1942 by the brilliant Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter to describe certain not-so-benign effects of the market system, and the right wing has clung to the concept ever since. In the right’s oversimplified version of Schumpeter’s idea, capitalists function as something akin to artists who must not be restrained by governments lest they lose their creative verve and nerve. Of course, such unregulated enthusiasm will from time to time lead to the destruction of old-fashioned, cherished ways of life and work. But these trades and practices were headed for the ash heap anyway, and from this “industrial mutation,” as Schumpeter put it, will arise, well . . . something wonderful.

Barcelona to ban Islamic face veils

Barcelona is set to become the first big city in Spain to ban Islamic face veils in public buildings such as markets and libraries.

"Barcelona will forbid the use of the burqa, niqab and any other item which hinders personal identification in any of the city's public installations"

Edgar Morin ou "éloge à la résistance"

Web of Deceit. Britain's Real Role in the World

The rhetoric behind the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq fit a pattern, not of humanitarian intervention, but of control of 'Third World' natural resources and markets through the installation of US-friendly 'democratic structures'.

The complicity of successive British governments, whether Labour or Conservative, in supporting the US in its role as number one rogue state.

The History of BP/British Petroleum and Its Role in the 1953 Iran Coup

Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, looks at the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s role in the 1953 CIA coup against Iran’s popular progressive prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh.

Contra la Intolerancia

Ataques a extranjeros porque tienen un color de piel diferente.

Congoleño lleva nueve años y medio en España. Antes del ataque, trabajaba de intérprete de la Comisión Española de Inmigración. Habla cuatro idiomas (francés, español, inglés y suajili).

Me gritó 'Arriba España' y 'Puto mono'"

futbol: el opio del pueblo

la utilización ideológica y política del campeonato mundial de futbol por el capitalismo

el futbol hace décadas que dejó de ser un deporte para transformarse en un negocio

herramienta de propaganda política

Dis(re)membering af-\pä-ki-ˈstän\

Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, Professor of Political Science
University of California, Berkeley

Neo-liberal reforms in Pakistan have meant the whole-sale privatization of land, water, minerals and energy. Each of the four provinces in Pakistan are endowed with unique resources that create very different economic incentive structures as they integrate into international markets and each has a distinctive linguistic and cultural history that provides the terrain for historically “verifiable” claims for secession. All four provinces have dominant political parties that are at odds with each other. If international integration built on these legacies, the Af-Pak war has pushed them to the brink.

The basic infrastructural and labor requirements that are wired into the different economies created through international investment has broadened regional fissures in the most basic way possible. The privatization of land and water in the Punjab and Sindh, leasing of mineral and gas rich regions in Balochistan and the consolidation of poppy growing regions in NWFP and Afghanistan, is creating ties with international corporate counter-parts that are world players locked into cut-throat competition. The advent of new internationalized property regimes has meant that mineral rich Balochistan, land and water rich Punjab (and to some extent Sindh) are integrating into international markets in very different ways.

To be sure, these property regimes put local farmers at risk, (thereby creating new waves of urban migration), deplete aquifers with ultra-modern drilling techniques, (thereby contributing to an already alarming water shortage), use capital intensive agricultural machinery (thereby creating unemployment), but importantly, they also stir up centrifugal political forces in the provinces. Particularly in the megalopolis of Karachi, the financial and industrial center of Pakistan, muhajirs (migrants to Pakistan at partition in 1947) and their powerful political party, the Muhajir Qaumi Mahaz (MQM) has deployed a robust imagined history of being “separate” from Pakistan. They possesses the resources and the human capital to conceive of an independent future. This imagined future involves the pursuit of the “city-state” strategy of international integration. The unreasonable but vibrant dream here is to compete with the likes of Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai. The MQM has taken a particularly hard line against allowing refugees into Karachi, followed by Sindh and Balochistan. Much of the recent violence in Karachi is related to a massive influx of refugees from the war zone.

The Iranian Revolution marked the onset of violent sectarian politics in which Iran and Saudi Arabia pitted Shia against Suni and turned sectarian killing into a divinely sanctioned mission. Starting with the eight year Iran-Iraq war, on to Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan and now Yemen, there is a way to read the whole post-1979 history of the Middle East and South Asia as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Pushing religion center-stage was an explicit US policy, born of the fantasy that Islam would defeat Socialism. The Mujahedeen were injected with a particularly virulent virus of divine inspiration in madrasas funded by the US and staffed by Saudi Arabia, first to create the subject-soldier who would fight to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan and then to pit the (Shia) Northern Alliance against the (Suni) Pashtun. Having infused the “freedom fighters” with a frenzied desire for Wahabbi-style martyrdom through madrasas, the virus was exported to Pakistan and beyond.

The rest is history. If two hundred years of British colonialism left its indelible footprint on the civil administration, the political geography and the class structure of Af-Pak, the end-game of the Cold War in Afghanistan thrust Pakistan directly into the military ambit of the US-Soviet military engagement starting in 1979 when the Islamic Revolution in Iran ratcheted up American interest in a compliant Pakistan. But earlier still, when Khalk and Parcham, the two Marxist parties that overthrew the monarchy in Afghanistan, fell into feuding and the Soviet involvement in Afghan politics went from meddling to invasion, the CIA arranged for the removal of leftist (and wildly popular) Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1977 in a bloodless coup. His replacement, General Zia ul Haq, obliged the United States by putting Bhutto to death by hanging in the middle of the night. In 1979.

The depth of the training and arms the Mujahedeen received in US military camps in America was comprehensive. It was there that the secrets of turning (NH2)2CO, (a common fertilizer) into bombs were revealed. True to form, the US left Af-Pak even before the retreat of the defeated Soviet army, as the Mujahedeen slowly morphed into the Taliban. The Pakistan government and military continued their support of the Taliban as the latter fought their way from Kandahar to Kabul, with the support of all but a handful of westernized Afghans. And, conveniently forgotten as the rain-fed mushrooms quietly covered the ground, so did the United States.

As late as 1997, when the nature of the Taliban’s policy towards female education and women’s rights, not to mention their criminal justice “system” had already become a known fact, the US State Department twice entertained a delegation of Taliban to help UNOCAL nudge out their sometime partner in a sometime pipeline, the Argentinean oil firm Bridas. The UNOCAL-Taliban deal failed. Black and blue were no longer welcome at the White House. Afghanistan became a rogue state, the erstwhile “Freedom Fighters” became “terrorists” and then 911 delivered the carte blanche for the invasion of Afghanistan even though the perpetrators of the attack were mostly from the friendly country of Saudi Arabia.

So, what does even a small snapshot of a multi-dimensional proxy war look like? The algebra is bewildering: The US funds the Pakistan army to eliminate the Taliban that they themselves created a little more than a decade ago; the same weapons are used against Baloch nationalists; the US also supplies weapons to the Baloch nationalists to kill the same Punjabi soldiers that are trying to annihilate the Taliban; the Baloch are funded by India against Iran; the US supplies Iranian Baloch with money and weapons to destabilize Tehran; the US humiliates the Pakistani Army and drives a rift between the military and the citizens; the Chinese and the Russians supply the Af-Pak Taliban against the US; Saudi Arabia funds the (Sunni) Af-Pak Taliban and the Baloch nationalists to weaken Shi’i Iran. Much to the chagrin of the Pakistani public and the Pakistani army, the United States’ security interests result in a deal whereby it gains control over Pakistan air bases at Pasni, Panjgur, and Dalbadin. The bases sit on a straight line from Gwadar going north into other US controlled bases in Afghanistan—it’s another straight line to Turkmenistan. The railway links proposed in the Gwadar Port Authority’s master-plan go through all three bases, right up to Helmand Province, where an additional 30,000 U.S soldiers will soon land to perform what one New York Times journalist called the “hammer and anvil” operation to exterminate the border-crossing tribesmen. [Scott Shane, “The War in Pashtunistan,” NYT, December 6, 2009.] Much like the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, no one really knows who is responsible for the urban “terrorist” attacks. Meanwhile, the Chinese quietly continue to fund and build their mega infrastructural projects in the north, mine copper in Afghanistan and extract minerals in Balochistan.

Chomsky on French Intellectualism versus American Pragmatism

Quoted from Understanding Power: the Indispensable Chomsky, edited by P.R. Mitchell and J. Schoeffel, pp 96-97.

"...if you compare the United States with France -- or with most of Europe, for that matter -- I think one of the healthy things about the United States is precisely this: there's very little respect for intellectuals as such. And there shouldn't be. What's there to respect? I mean, in France if you're part of the intellectual elite and you cough, there's a front-page story in Le Monde. That's one of the reasons why French intellectual culture is so farcical -- it's like Hollywood. You're in front of the television cameras all the time, and you've got to keep doing something new so they'll keep focusing on you and not on the guy at the next table, and people don't have ideas that are that good, so they have to come up with crazy stuff, and the intellectuals get all pompous and self-important. So I remember during the Vietnam War, there'd be these big international campaigns to protest the war, and a number of times I was asked to co-sign letters with, say, Jean-Paul Sartre [French philosopher]. Well, we'd co-sign some statement, and in France it was front-page news; here, nobody even mentioned it. And the French thought that was scandalous; I thought it was terrific -- why the hell should anybody mention it? What difference does it make if two guys who happen to have some name recognition got together and signed a statement? Why should that be of any particular interest to anybody? So I think the American reaction [towards intellectuals] is much healthier in this respect."

Naomi Klein on oil spill

"Upside Down World Cup": Raj Patel

How South Africa Has Cracked Down on the Poor and the Shack Dwellers’ Movement Ahead of the World Cup

As the 2010 World Cup opens in South Africa, Raj Patel looks at one of the most overlooked aspects of this year’s tournament: the ongoing struggle of tens of thousands of shack dwellers across the country. Over the past year, shack settlement leaders in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town have been chased from their homes by gangs, arrested, detained without hearing, and assaulted. As the World Cup begins, a shack dwellers’ movement known as Abahlali baseMjondolo is mounting what they call an "Upside Down World Cup" campaign to draw attention to their plight.

Ernesto Laclau. Philosophical roots of discourse theory

Analytical philosophy: the later Wittgenstein.

Phenomenology: the existential analytic of Heidegger

Structuralism and post-structuralist. Critique of the sign: Barthes, Derrida, Lacan.

Barthes’ criticism of the strict separation between connotation and denotation, as it takes place in his later work, especially in S/Z, Derrida’s notion of écriture and the critique of the logic of supplementarity accompanying it, and Lacan’s logic of the signifier, which radically questions the relation between signifier and signified and conceives the bar separating them not only as a link making possible signification but as an obstacle to it.

Women without men

In her feature-film debut, visual artist Shirin Neshat offers a crafted view of Iran in 1953, when a British- and U.S.-backed coup removed the democratically elected government. Adapted from the novel by Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur, the film weaves together the stories of five women during those traumatic days, whose experiences are shaped by their faith and the social structures in place.

COMENTARIO DE NOÉ HERNÁNDEZ CORTEZ. ESCRITO EL 17 DE MAYO DE 2010

Roger Bartra, melancolía, intelectuales y democracia

Roger Bartra en la edición de mayo de Letras Libres ha publicado un breve texto titulado Poder, intelectuales y opinadores. Consiste en mirar la situación anímica de los intelectuales en el nuevo entorno democrático que vive México. El diagnóstico de la enfermedad es la melancolía que padecen los intelectuales en este nuevo ambiente democrático, aprovechado por los opinadores. Pero habría que precisar que se entiende por intelectual.

Zaid ha definido con precisión qué es un intelectual, en su memorable ensayo Intelectuales publicado en la revista Vuelta No. 168 (1990), escribe el ensayista: “El intelectual es el escritor, artista o científico que opina en cosas de interés público con autoridad moral entre las élites.

1. No son intelectuales

a) Los que no intervienen en la vida pública.
b) Los que intervienen como especialistas.
c) Los que adoptan la perspectiva de un interés particular.
d) Los que opinan por cuenta de terceros.
e) Los que opinan sujetos a una verdad oficial (política, administrativa, académica, religiosa).
f) Los que son escuchados por su autoridad religiosa o por su capacidad de imponerse por vía armada, política, administrativa, económica.
g) Los taxistas, peluqueros y otros que hacen lo mismo que los intelectuales, pero sin el respeto de las élites.
h) Los miembros de las élites que quisieran ser vistos como intelectuales, pero no consiguen el micrófono o (cuando lo consiguen) no interesan al público.
i) Los que se ganan la atención de un público tan amplio, que resulta ofensivo para las élites.” (Zaid, Vuelta No. 168, 1990).

Teniendo presente esta definición de Zaid, no creo en el diagnóstico sociológico de Bartra de que “Gran parte de la intelectualidad –que en buena medida impulsó con su actitud crítica los cambios democráticos- ha renunciado a colaborar en la construcción de una nueva cultura democrática.” (Bartra, Letras Libres, mayo 2010). Afortunadamente intelectuales como Carlos Monsiváis y Sergio Pitol participan con voz propia en el espacio público. El propio pensamiento social de Zaid no se podría reducir a la consigna de Bartra: “…deberían impulsar racionalmente un orgullo democrático en sustitución del patrioterismo autoritario…” (Bartra, Letras Libres, mayo 2010).
http://noehernandezcortez.wordpress.com/

Noam Chomsky on Global Warming

Amin Maalouf gana el premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras

El escritor libanés, autor de León el Africano, vive en Francia desde 1975

Immigration: Don’t Let “Reform” Be an Excuse for Increased Repression

Activists Call for 'Public Outcry' over Oil Disaster

An exhausted oil-covered brown pelican tries to climb over an oil containment boom along Queen Bess Island Pelican Rookery, 3 miles (4.8 km) northeast of Grand Isle, Louisiana June 5, 2010. Wildlife experts are working to rescue birds from the rookery which has been affected by BP's Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and transporting them to the Fort Jackson Rehabilitation Center.

Bilderberg 2010

From Islam to America: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books.

Eduardo Galeano

Cristóbal Colón no consiguió descubrir América, porque no tenía visa y ni siquiera tenía pasaporte.

A Pedro Alvares Cabral le prohibieron desembarcar en Brasil, porque podía contagiar la viruela, el sarampión, la gripe y otras pestes desconocidas en el país.

Hernán Cortés y Francisco Pizarro se quedaron con las ganas de conquistar México y Perú, porque carecían de permiso de trabajo.

Pedro de Alvarado rebotó en Guatemala y Pedro de Valdivia no pudo entrar en Chile, porque no llevaban certificados policiales de buena conducta.

Los peregrinos del Mayflower fueron devueltos a la mar, porque en las costas de Massachusetts no había cuotas abiertas de inmigración.

Arizona, the show me your papers state

If your only tool is a hammer, you see every problem as a nail.

Israel and the "Freedom Flotilla"

Under no circumstances does Israel, or any other country, have the right to board humanitarian aid vessels, guns blazing, in international waters. By most definitions, this is piracy, pure and simple. International maritime law gives the crew of ships attacked in international waters the right to defend themselves. Certainly it would have been better if the largely Turkish crew of the ship where most of the fatalities took place had not fought back. But it was well within their legal right to do so.

The "Freedom Flotilla" — a convoy of six ships organized by a coalition of human rights activists from Europe, North America, the Middle East, and elsewhere — allowed people to take part in the "Freedom Flotilla,"only on the grounds that they "agree to adhere to the principles of non-violence and non-violent resistance in word and deed at all times."

Critics of the flotilla are partially correct in observing that the purpose of the voyage was not just to deliver badly needed aid, but to "provoke a confrontation." This, however, is part of the great tradition of nonviolent direct action. For example, civil rights activists in the 1960s were similarly criticized for provoking confrontation by sitting in at lunch counters, marching across Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge, and demonstrating in downtown Birmingham. It was only through such confrontations, revealing the brutality of the oppressor, that change was made.

The Obama administration does not appear to be very interested in making change when it comes to its policies toward Israel. Indeed, the U.S. response to this tragedy is very reminiscent of the U.S.-backed Salvadoran junta's atrocities in the 1980s. For example, when the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military murdered three American nuns and a Catholic lay worker involved in humanitarian relief efforts, the Reagan administration claimed that they were actually "political activists" who may have engaged in "an exchange of fire" with the Salvadoran soldiers, resulting in their deaths. Similarly, when the junta arrested 60 humanitarian aid workers, the Reagan administration defended the mass kidnapping on the grounds that the army had found such "weapons" as sharp sticks and gasoline, in the church basement where some of these aid workers had created a sanctuary for peasants seeking refuge from government-backed death squads. That such objects might have civilian uses was deemed irrelevant in an effort to depict the church workers as supporters of terrorism.