Al cielo por la izquierda

El marxismo se volvió convencional en los medios universitarios. No en vano se vendieron más de un millón de ejemplares de Los conceptos elementales del materialismo histórico de Marta Harnecker, que en el mundo universitario equivalía a Cómo ganar amigos e influir sobre las personas de Dale Carnegie: una guía práctica para acomodarse en la ruta del éxito social.

Triste es decirlo: así como los hombres de negocios hablan de libertad de empresa, pero no leen a Adam Smith; así como no tenemos las obras completas de Smith en español, y por temporadas ni siquiera La riqueza de las naciones; más universitarios compraron libros de Harnecker que de Marx; y, aunque parezca increíble (de los medios universitarios), se acabó el marxismo sin que tengamos las obras completas de Marx en español.

Es imposible estar a la izquierda en todo y con respecto a todos: no estar a la derecha de nada ni de nadie. No hay tal lugar. ¿Por qué, sin embargo, en México, se pretende esa posición imposible? Porque lo importante no es la realidad, sino el realismo político de no ser rebasado por la izquierda y arrojado a las llamas. Hay que estar, pues, absolutamente a la izquierda, aunque tal posición no exista, aunque se reduzca a declarar que mi posición relativa es absoluta. Así aparece el “ontologismo”. No estoy a la izquierda de tal posición en tal punto, y por lo tanto a la derecha de tal otra: soy de izquierda; más aún: soy la izquierda.

Los intelectuales franceses que llegaban a México se asombraban de la recepción hostil en los medios universitarios a ideas perfectamente normales en la izquierda francesa. Una hostilidad que no era debate sino recitación furiosa del catecismo para exorcizar ideas malignas. Así se explica que los libros marxistas publicados por Siglo XXI seguían vendiéndose en México cuando en España (y, desde luego, en Francia) ya no se vendían.

Uno de los autores de Siglo XXI, el sociólogo Nicos Poulantzas, con un gesto terrible de autocrítica, se lanzó de la Tour Montparnasse abrazado a sus libros, como deseando que murieran con él. Mejor hubiese sido que viviera para hacer una sociología marxista del marxismo, para entender por qué tantos intelectuales fueron ciegos ante la realidad del “socialismo real”.

Leszek Kołakowski se adelantó a la incertidumbre que estaba por llegar publicando un credo personal donde integra ideales conservadores, liberales y socialistas. Empieza con humor, recordando una frase que escuchó en un tranvía repleto de la Polonia comunista. El conductor les dijo: “Por favor, avancen hacia atrás” (“Cómo ser un conservador-liberal-socialista”,Vuelta, noviembre de 1979; recogido en La modernidad siempre a prueba).

Sobre viajes repletos cuando todos quieren ir al cielo por la izquierda, hay otra anécdota de otro país revolucionario. En algún lugar de México, para asegurarse de que sus feligreses entendían la maravilla que es el cielo, el párroco pregunta:

–Vamos a ver. ¿Quiénes quieren ir al cielo?

En la misa están todos: campesinos, artesanos, tenderos, agiotistas, autoridades, prostitutas, curanderos y caciques. Y todos levantan la mano, excepto un viejo campesino. El párroco, extrañado, le pregunta por qué. Y el disidente ofrece su mejor excusa:

–Es que este viaje va muy lleno. ~

Mona Eltahawy

Arab youth against old failed leadership

'Inside Job' Director Excoriates Wall Street

LOS ANGELES - "Inside Job," a film blaming financial institutions for triggering the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, won the Academy Award for best documentary on Sunday.

The winners of the Best Documentary Feature 'Inside Job,' Charles Ferguson and Audrey Marrs address the audience the 83rd Annual Academy Awards at the Kodak Theatre on February 27, 2011 in Hollywood, California. AFP PHOTO / GABRIEL BOUYSDirector Charles Ferguson started off his acceptance speech lamenting that "not a single financial executive has gone to jail and that is wrong," drawing applause from the Hollywood celebrity audience.

Mona Eltahawy's challenge to J Street

Democracy Movements in the Arab World.

Non-violence revolution

Can the US have a Tahrir moment?

Americans - the people as much as their leaders - are so busy dismantling the social, political and economic foundations of their former greatness that they are unable to see how much they have become like the stereotype of the traditional Middle Eastern society that for so long was used to justify, alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) supporting authoritarian leaders or imposing foreign rule.

The youth of the Arab world, until yesterday considered a "demographic bomb" waiting to explode in religious militancy and Islamo-fascism, is suddenly revealed to be a demographic gift, providing precisely the vigour and imagination that for generations the people of the region have been told they lacked. They have wired - or more precisely today, unwired - themselves for democracy, creating virtual and real public spheres were people from across the political, economic and social spectrum are coming together in common purpose. Meanwhile, in the US it seems young people are chained to their iPods, iPhones and social media, which has anesthetised and depoliticised them in inverse proportion to its liberating effect on their cohorts across the ocean.

Indeed, the majority of young people today are so focused on satisfying their immediate economic needs and interests that they are largely incapable of thinking or acting collectively or proactively. Like frogs being slowly boiled alive, they are adjusting to each new setback - a tuition increase, here, lower job prospects there - desperately hoping to get a competitive edge in a system that is increasingly stacked against them.

Oil-Rich Saudis Try to Stave Off Revolution With Cash

An unprecedented economic package will provide Saudis interest-free home loans, unemployment assistance and sweeping debt forgiveness.

Interest-free loans for Saudis to buy or build homes. The move could help reduce an 18-year waiting list for Saudis to qualify for a loan.

Other measures included a 15 percent cost of living adjustment for government workers, a year of unemployment assistance for youth and nearly doubling to 15 individuals the size of families that are eligible for state aid. The government also will write off the debts of people who had borrowed from the development fund and later died.

While Saudi Arabia has been mostly spared the unrest rippling through the Middle East, a robust protest movement has risen up in its tiny neighbor, Bahrain, which like others around the region is centered on calls for representative government and relief from poverty and unemployment.

A Facebook page calling for a "March 11 Revolution of Longing" in Saudi Arabia has begun attracting hundreds of viewers. A message posted on the page calls for "the ousting of the regime" and lists demands including the election of a ruler and members of the advisory assembly known as the Shura Council.

Wittgenstein

BBC Radio

Wittgenstein -the good, the not-so-good, and the ugly. The good things are, Wittgenstein's early notions about language as a game and his observation that the world is made up of facts, not of things. The not-so-good, is Wittgenstein's philosophy of mind, which led to behaviorism and similar theories. The ugly: Wittgenstein's attacks on philosophy and philosophers in general, as well as the cult of personality that developed surrounding him and his later work.

The "linguistic turn" in 20th century philosophy. Wittgenstein combined the logical systems of Frege and Russell with his own insights to create a new way of looking at the way we use language. The accomplishments of Frege and Russell and the explosion of developments in formal logic which really led to the underpinnings of modern computer science. Difference between formal Logic with a big-L and everyday logic. Wittgenstein tried to integrate these notions under the guise of human language.

Truth and argument. Wittgenstein observes those who discuss everyday matters and those who argue philosophical doctrines. This talk of logic as a "scaffolding" of the world which conditions all of our interactions leads to the discussion of Wittgenstein's unique theory of language. The distinction between "saying" and "showing". The early and late Wittgenstein. His disillusionment with the idea that we can make wide universal statements about logic or even morality. The ethical arguments in Wittgenstein's work. The development of ethics from Kant to Wittgenstein. The methodological points that Wittgenstein makes. Is philosophy useful? If it doesn't answer universal questions, what questions can it answer?

Conceptions and misconceptions about Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein's legacy and influence in cognitive science and linguistics. Language as a game and logic as a universal framework.

Foods for your bones

The political power of literature

What role artists and thinkers have in social revolution?

Las fortunas de la cleptocracia

Los Gadafi, como los Ben Ali y los Mubarak, controlaban los principales sectores económicos de sus países.

Mubarak (derecha), junto a Gadafi y Ben Ali (izquierda), en una cumbre en Sirte (Libia) (2010)

Libya's lucrative ties

How guilt is the West double standards when it comes to deal with Arab regimes?

Getting Over a Breakup Is Like Getting Over Cocaine

The area of the brain that is active during the pain and anguish experienced during a breakup is the same part of the brain associated with motivation, reward and addiction cravings. Brain imaging shows similarities between romantic rejection and cocaine craving. Rejection hurts so acutely because we get addicted to the relationship, only to have it taken away from us. And after, just like a drug addiction, we go through withdrawal.

We Aren't That Good at Dealing With Loss

In general, humans aren't good with dealing with loss. The pain of losing something is much stronger than the joy of gaining something. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman received the Nobel Prize for his work in Prospect Theory. Prospect Theory describes how people make choices in situations where they have to decide between alternatives that involve risk. For example, individuals view the pain of losing $50 as much stronger than the joy of receiving $50. What this means as far as rejection is concerned is that ending a relationship can often hurt much more than the joy of starting a new one. This is because of the psychological fact that our brains view loss as more significant than gain.

Because loss feels stronger than gain, we tend to be loss averse, meaning we will be motivated to avoid risks that involve losing rather than to take risks involved in the potential for gains.

Effects of Cell Phone Radiofrequency Signal Exposure on Brain Glucose Metabolism

The dramatic increase in use of cellular telephones has generated concern about possible negative effects of radiofrequency signals delivered to the brain.

Cell phone exposure was associated with increased brain glucose metabolism in the region closest to the antenna.

Los celulares afectan al cerebro

Pasar 50 minutos con un celular pegado a la oreja es suficiente para cambiar la actividad de las neuronas de la parte del cerebro más cercana a la antena.

El cerebro reacciona a los campos electromagnéticos causados por las señales telefónicas inalámbricas.

Utiliza un auricular en lugar de colocarte el móvil junto a la oreja.

Qadhafi Incorporated

Cables obtained by WikiLeaks offer a vivid account of the lavish spending, rampant nepotism and bitter rivalries.

Qaddafi’s tight control of the media have added to the public anger now boiling over. And the tensions between siblings could emerge as a factor in the chaos in the oil-rich African country.

Gadafi - Libia

Gadafi acapara el poder en un país sin Constitución, Parlamento ni partidos y su endiosamiento carece de límites.
El "gobierno de las masas populares" es él. Por eso, el espectáculo de los últimos días, con docenas de miles de manifestantes que, como en Teherán, salen valientemente a la calle desafiando los disparos de la policía y de los matones a sueldo, llena de euforia a quienes conocen su régimen opresor al servicio de su megalomanía.

Abdallah Abu Rahmah, the Palestinian Gandhi

Israel & Palestine: Breaking the Silence

The unrest in Lybia

US economics: One big Ponzi scheme

Bankers continue to profit as the poor lose their homes and hope.

What is clear is that ripping off the rich is punished far more severely than ripping off the poor.

The speed with which Bernie Madoff was sentenced, preventing him from being tried - a process which, through diligent cross-examination, would have brought us more information on the details of his dirty deals.

Madoff is still not coming clean about the web of alliances he had internationally, as well as in New York. We live in a global economy after all. We now know of Swiss and Austrian connections - but what about Israel, where this ingratiating handler was well known for his connections with Jewish philanthropists and institutions? So far, that story has yet to be told.

At the same time, the people investigating Madoff are making a small fortune. According to the Financial Times: "The army of lawyers and consultants helping to recover funds from Bernard Madoff's $19.6bn fraud stand to earn more than $1.3bn in fees, according to new figures that detail the cost of liquidating the huge Ponzi scheme."

The best reporting on this subject is not in the mainstream press but in a music magazine, Rolling Stone, where Matt Taibbi investigates why the whole of Wall Street is not in jail: "Financial crooks brought down the world’s economy - but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them," he charges.

Andrew Leonard asks in Salon: "Should we trust him? After all, if there is one thing we know about Bernie Madoff, it is that he is one hell of a liar. But as evidence emerges that bank executives were exchanging emails wondering about Madoff’s amazing investment record, the possibility that the banks were purposefully looking the other way is not inconceivable."

Many activists say they want to emulate the Egyptians, but who will organise anything as effective - even in a land that used to be known for people's movements - to raise hell? In Egypt, young people used the internet to organise and mobilise for change. In the US, the internet seems to function more as an escape valve, consuming hours of our time and giving us another way to talk to each other - and ventilate against the government. Social media here seems to be more for socialising.

The government supports internet freedom abroad - but restricts it and spies on it at home. Obama has already supported a law allowing him to shut it down here in a national emergency.

The passivity of the public is one result of the inundation by middle-of-the-road media and effective information deprivation.

As Noam Chomsky puts it: "The population in the United States is angry, frustrated and full of fear and irrational hatreds. And the folks not far from you on Wall Street are just doing fine. They're the ones who created the current crisis. They're the ones who were called upon to deal with it. They're coming out stronger and richer than ever. But everything's fine - as long as the population is passive."

Negros y mulatos brasileños son un 80% más europeos que africanos

El estudio sobre un millar de personas demuestra también que la contribución africana es también mayor que la indígena que no supera el 10%.

Contra lo que se pensaba hasta ahora, negros y mestizos, cuyo porcentaje entre los 190 millones de ciudadanos ha superado ya el 52% de la población, tienen un ADN mucho más europeo que africano o indio.

Social networks, social revolution

Youtube, Facebook and Twitter have become the new weapons of mass mobilisation.

The Genie Is Out of the Bottle

The Arab moment has come. Change is coming to the Middle East, to the Arab world, in general.

Tunisia, Egypt... will the US be next?

Riz Khan

The Egypt effect
US old clicles and stereotypes need to be deleted.

Amazon Watch

Ecuadorian Court Orders Chevron to Pay $17 Billion for Oil Pollution in Amazon

Revolution 2.0

Egypt's revolution is like Wikipedia. Everyone is contributing content. You don't know the names of the people contributing the content.

Ghonim, Google's head of marketing in the Middle East and North Africa, was one of the moderators of a Facebook page called "We Are All Khaled Said" dedicated to memory of an Egyptian man who witnesses say was beaten to death in Alexandria by police officers who have not been held to account.

Internet Revolution

Wael Ghonim: I am ready to die!

Un tribunal ecuatoriano condena a Chevron a pagar 6.100 millones por contaminar la Amazonia

30.000 ciudadanos acusaron a la compañía de dañar sus tierras y matar sus animales con el vertido de material tóxico.

Google, Wael Ghonim

Egypt's new revolution

Besos contra la homofobia

Policía golpea a parejas LTGB en Lima

Joe Biden: Egypt's Mubarak an Ally, Not a Dictator

El cisne negro: la obsesión como cárcel

El autocontrol agonico

La rebeldía árabe. La historia no está escrita y toma direcciones que escapan a todas las teorías

La explosión socio-política árabe. Tunisia y Egipto padecían dictaduras de decenas de años, corruptas hasta el tuétano, cuyos gobernantes, parientes cercanos y clientelas oligárquicas habían acumulado inmensas fortunas, bien seguras en el extranjero, mientras la pobreza y el desempleo, así como la falta de educación y salud, mantenían a enormes sectores de la población en niveles de mera subsistencia y a veces en la hambruna. La corrupción generalizada y un sistema de favoritismo y privilegio cerraban a la mayoría de la población todos los canales de ascenso económico y social.

La revolución de la información ha ido agujereando por doquier los rígidos sistemas de censura que las satrapías árabes habían instalado a fin de tener a los pueblos que explotaban y saqueaban en la ignorancia y el oscurantismo tradicionales.

Technological metaphors - The use of new media

“Mubarak is offline”

“Delete Mubarak”

By overcoming their fears, Cairo's protesters have changed the Arab world

A first draft of why it happened must begin in a rural town in Tunisia on the shores of the Mediterranean where Mohamed Bouazizi was the unlikeliest catalyst of the extraordinary realignment in the region.

Known locally as Basboosa, Mohamed, aged 26, was a street fruit vendor in Sidi Bouzid, where unemployment is conservatively estimated at 30%. He earned around £87 a month, the money going to support his six siblings, including one sister in university. He was regularly stopped by police, who expected him to pay them bribes to allow him to sell his wares from a wheelbarrow. On the morning of 17 December last year he had spent the equivalent of £125 on merchandise when it was seized.

What made the loss harder to take was the humiliation. A 45-year-old female officer slapped him across the face, spat at him, scattered his fruit on the ground and confiscated his electronic scales. Two of her colleagues joined in, beating him. As a coup de grace, the woman insulted Mohamed's dead father, a labourer who died of a heart attack when his eldest son was just three years old.

Mohamed finally snapped. For decades millions of young men like him right across the North African coastal plain have watched television images beamed from the other side of the Mediterranean from a European continent of prosperity, freedom and opportunity. They have watched the cronies of their own regimes growing older and, in their decadence, more arrogant and corrupt. They have watched hope for a better future leaking away.

Seeking justice, Mohamed went to the local governor's office to complain about his treatment. He issued a warning when told that the governor was unavailable: "If you don't see me, I'll burn myself." At 11.30am, less than an hour after he had been robbed and humiliated by the state's forces, he doused himself in petrol in front of the governor's office and set himself alight.

"What kind of repression do you imagine it takes for a young man to do this?" said his sister Samia when her brother finally died of horrific injuries on 4 January. "A man who has to feed his family by buying goods on credit when they fine him ... and take his goods. In Sidi Bouzid, those with no connections and no money for bribes are humiliated and insulted and not allowed to live."

For decades Tunisia had been characterised by the west as a "model" Arab nation, but the WikiLeaks saga, months earlier, revealed the ugly truth of what its key sponsor, the United States, really thought of this "mafia state", run as a virtual private enterprise by Ben Ali and his hated, avaricious wife Leila Trabelsi, who plundered 1.5 tonnes of gold from the central bank when they fled to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

In Egypt, Khaled Said was beaten to death by the two officers who came looking for him. They smashed his head against a marble ledge in the lobby of the building next door before throwing his body into the back of a van, driving around, then dumping it by the roadside. It later emerged that Said had taped a secret video depicting what appeared to be corrupt local security chiefs dividing up the spoils of a drugs bust. His family also discovered self-penned anti-government songs stored on his computer.

Online, Facebook group "We are all Khaled Said", quickly gathered hundreds of thousands, of supporters, who swapped information on other examples of inhumane police treatment and helped organise small-scale acts of civil disobedience.

Along with a loose network of more explicitly political online activist groups, the anonymous administrators behind Kolina Khaled Said – one of whom turned out to be Google's regional marketing executive, Wael Ghonim, who attended to the web page from his home 1,500 miles away in Dubai – tried to find creative ways to get round Egypt's suffocating legal prohibitions on collective action in an effort to make their voices heard on the ground.

Nonsensical

The square root of three is purple.

This very sentence consists of seven words.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Al Jazeera

Egypt's remarkable 18 days

No you can't

Slavoj Žižek

There is no room for compromise. Either the entire Mubarak edifice falls, or the uprising is betrayed.

FBI Can Get Phone Records Without Oversight

That interpretation could be stretched to apply to e-mails as well.

Egypt, Al Jazeera

Egypt, Al Jazeera

Mona Eltahawy

"How do you define media?"

DohaDebates 4

DohaDebates 3

DohaDebates 2

DohaDebates 1

DohaDebates 6

DohaDebates. 5

Mona Eltahawy on first Muslim Miss America

Mona Eltahawy interviewed on Danish TV about the revolution in Egypt

Mona Eltahawy

Being a Bumble Bee

Derrida & Wittgenstein -- Again

Wittgenstein’s achievement in the history of philosophy consists in turning philosophy away from logical analysis toward contextual explication, and even more in undermining the dominance of epistemology that had characterized mainstream philosophy since Descartes.

Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, along with G. E. Moore, are the pillars of the “linguistic turn” in philosophy. Wittgenstein, however, came to disagree with the other three in fundamental ways, and the divergence resulted in (or perhaps consisted in) pushing epistemology into the back seat.

According to Wittgensteins logic could not be a science like any other, and hence hinted at his distinctive view, in opposition to both Frege and Russell, that the propositions of logic (and later of grammar) do not convey truth or information in the way that scientific propositions do. His later insistence that clarity is to be achieved by descriptions of use (hence contextually), rather than by analysis, constitutes a sharp radical break from all three of these early mentors.