Latest Updates: authoritarianism RSS
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johnpi
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johnpi
Royal coup: Jordan’s king remakes his government.
In recent days, King Abdullah II, popularly perceived in the West as being among the most enlightened Middle East leaders, has dismissed the prime minister and replaced him with a palace aide and loyalist, dissolved Parliament and postponed legislative elections for a year.
The king’s decisions were widely seen here as an effort to free the government from a recalcitrant legislature so it could push through financial measures viewed as essential to shoring up an economy burdened by debt and deficit. The Parliament, dissolved midway through its term, had opposed cuts in spending and the reduction of business taxes, key components of the government’s financial plan.
While King Abdullah often talks about human rights and democracy, the reality here is often quite different, rights advocates say.
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johnpi
“The way the Muslim Brotherhood group manages internal disagreement shows … the low level of the group’s flexibility in dealing with those who disagree with it. The competition between the group wings seems to be a “zero sum” game,” writes Khalil al-Anani, an analyst at Egypt’s Al-Siyassa Al-Dawliya magazine.
“Therefore, very often the conservatives will insist on punishing the reformists organisationally, politically and morally and under the claim of keeping the cohesiveness of the group.”
I’m highlighting the excerpt above because it rings true with my experience generally that conservatives tend to retaliate in-group and have trouble sharing power (the tendency of conservatives in any polity to drift toward authoritarianism is well-documented). The strength of the movement overall will in part be determined by conservatives ability to restrain themselves.
Also in the article, some MB supporters say government media is hyping the conflict to try to weaken the group.
For background here’s a previous story about the clash here.
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thabet
Inayat Bunglawala continues to shock and surprise by becoming, for want of a better word, ‘liberal’:
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johnpi
Unique among immigrant-bashing nativist movements, writes Sara at Orcinus, the Minutemen militias seem to let women take leadership roles. Since movement members racism is often only exceeded by their sexism, “There’s a good argument to be made that authoritarianism is, at its core, a fetishization of all things “masculine,” which means it generally can’t exist without the reflexive subjugation of all things feminine.”
So it’s unusual that you can find three women in right-wing leadership roles: Laine Lawless, Shawna Forde, and Brandi Baron.
The Seattle Weekly has a new article on Ford, who has apparently had a difficult life: foster care, shoplifting, prostitution arrests, repeated marriages and name changes. Ford, who told her followers that she saw brown-skinned immigrants as filthy, lowly lawbreakers, was recently charged for the double murder of a Mexican man and his 9-year-old daughter.
Sara writes:
It would not surprise any of us, I think, to find out that Brandi Baron and Laine Lawless had similarly troubled biographies — as do almost all of the men who commit acts of far-right extremist violence.
When feminism promised to give us all the same opportunities men had, I’m pretty sure this is not what the movement’s foremothers had in mind.
I guess this means we’ve finally arrived. It doesn’t feel much like victory, though.
Laine Lawless is the former high priestess of Sisterhood of the Moon, a lesbian pagan organization, and got into trouble in 2006 for sending a letter to a neo-Nazi leader asking if some of his “warriors” would be willing to engage in a terror campaign that would include beatings, stealing non-white peoples’ paychecks and “Discouraging Spanish-speaking children from going to school. Be creative.”
And here’s video of Brandi Baron demanding to ‘Kill any man, woman or child who comes across the border illegally.’
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thabet
Rod Liddle rips off Johann Hari’s article on Dubai. As ever with these articles the real fun is in reading the comments section.
I haven’t been able to take anything Liddle says seriously since he turned up on a Channel 4 series on immigration to moan about the darkies taking his seat on the buses and trains. Although the abuses he highlights are true, how seriously can anyone take Liddle’s complaint about human rights abuses given only earlier this year he was linking human rights with appeasement for terrorists?
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thabet
Using Kung Fu Panda to link Italian and Iranian politics, and discuss democracy and capitalism? That could only mean an article by Slavoj Žižek:
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The wager behind Berlusconi’s vulgarities is that the people will identify with him as embodying the mythic image of the average Italian: I am one of you, a little bit corrupt, in trouble with the law, in trouble with my wife because I’m attracted to other women. Even his grandiose enactment of the role of the noble politician, il cavaliere, is more like an operatic poor man’s dream of greatness. Yet we shouldn’t be fooled: behind the clownish mask there is a state power that functions with ruthless efficiency. Perhaps by laughing at Berlusconi we are already playing his game. A technocratic economic administration combined with a clownish façade does not suffice, however: something more is needed. That something is fear, and here Berlusconi’s two-headed dragon enters: immigrants and ‘communists’ (Berlusconi’s generic name for anyone who attacks him, including the Economist).
Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon hit, provides the basic co-ordinates for understanding the ideological situation I have been describing.
