Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label politics
" Though it was originally published before the iconic events of 9/11, now more than a decade ago, S. Sayyid’s  A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism  (1997) has assumed even more timely significance since its first appearance. In this pioneering book, Sayyid provocatively suggests, and one can still see the logic of his proposition, that we must see political Islamism as a particular phase of decolonization of Muslim political cultures. Sayyid took the rise of Islamism as a challenge to ‘Western’ political hegemony, and particularly its self-congratulatory declaration of the End of History. That proposition still demands attention." Islamism — A Eurocentric Position?
Post a Comment
Read more
" Lorna Finlayson’s book has the deceptively simple aim of showing that there is no distinction in kind to be drawn between the methodology of political philosophy and the philosophy itself.   And, she suggests, since the methodology is in turn really just a way of trying to sustain the distinction between political philosophy and politics, the collapse of this distinction also supports the claim that the political philosophy/politics distinction is itself untenable. Political philosophy—or, it turns out, mainstream analytic political philosophy—has a mistaken understanding of itself as standing outside or above the messy power-ridden realm of actual politics, Finlayson argues; this misunderstanding is ideologically motivated, and the methodology of political philosophy serves to exemplify and buttress it. Showing that the distinction between the methodology of political philosophy and political philosophy is ideological, in the pejorative sense familiar from critical theory sinc
Post a Comment
Read more

Britain

" [I]ntelligent philosophical Conservatism is actually closer to Marxist analysis than liberalism in any of its forms." — Neil Davidson On Corbyn and the Blairites
Read more
"What does it mean that Trump has done well among middle-income and higher-income voters but not the most-educated? This suggests that his real base of support is small-business owners, supervisory and middle-management employees, franchisees, landlords, real estate agents, propertied farmers, and so on: those who are not at the executive pinnacle of corporate America (who largely have MBAs and other similar degrees) and those who are not credentialed professionals (doctors, lawyers, and the like), but the much wider swath of those people whose livelihood is derived from independent business activity or middle-band positions in the corporate hierarchy." From Slump to Trump
Post a Comment
Read more
"Influence, n.: In politics, a visionary  quo  given in exchange for a substantial  quid ."  —  Ambrose Bierce
Post a Comment
Read more
"By its nature, The Apprentice exists to bring out the very worst in people. It’s a series about avarice, about stiffing people over in a suffocating kill-or-be-killed corporate environment. It’s a get-rich-quick-and-damn-the-consequences show. It might not have caused the 2008 banking crisis, but it probably didn’t help." Stuart Heritage, The Toxic Political Legacy of the Apprentice
Post a Comment
Read more
The Question of Sectarianism in Middle East Politics Over the centuries there have been many variations and mutations in the ‘orthodox’ as well as the sectarian formations, and the divisions only broke into conflicts when they were politicised into struggles for power or resources. For the most part, various Shi`ite sects lived quietly under Sunni rule, and were, mostly, left alone. Like elsewhere in the pre-modern world, communities were, typically, isolated in separate localities, except in the main cities  where they often occupied different quarters. Politicisation came with social conflicts, rebellions and geopolitical confrontations
Post a Comment
Read more