True, liberalism
everywhere gestures towards the supposed horrors of an alternative political
order in order to justify itself, but in the west these days it usually does so
with power on its
side. Muslim liberals, on the other hand, not only possess little power in
their own right, they have also been unable thus far to stage the spectacular
acts of sacrifice that mobilise people for a cause - acts of the kind that
militants are so adept at performing. These sacrificial acts need not even be
violent to be effective, as Gandhi and after him Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela demonstrated so
well through the entire course of the 20th century. Perhaps liberals are
incapable of staging such spectacles, given their devotion to protecting interests
rather than sacrificing them, which is why liberalism has always come to power
on the back of far more radical movements dedicated to religion, revolution or
revenge.
Group items tagged
Muslim liberals: epistles of moderation | openDemocracy - 0 views
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costly signals - violence and meaning
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Bourdieu on neoliberalism - 0 views
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Without a doubt, the practical establishment of this world of struggle would not succeed so completely without the complicity of all of the precarious arrangements that produce insecurity and of the existence of a reserve army of employees rendered docile by these social processes that make their situations precarious, as well as by the permanent threat of unemployment. This reserve army exists at all levels of the hierarchy, even at the higher levels, especially among managers. The ultimate foundation of this entire economic order placed under the sign of freedom is in effect the structural violence of unemployment, of the insecurity of job tenure and the menace of layoff that it implies. The condition of the "harmonious" functioning of the individualist micro-economic model is a mass phenomenon, the existence of a reserve army of the unemployed.
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Economists may not necessarily share the economic and social interests of the true believers and may have a variety of individual psychic states regarding the economic and social effects of the utopia which they cloak with mathematical reason. Nevertheless, they have enough specific interests in the field of economic science to contribute decisively to the production and reproduction of belief in the neoliberal utopia. Separated from the realities of the economic and social world by their existence and above all by their intellectual formation, which is most frequently purely abstract, bookish, and theoretical, they are particularly inclined to confuse the things of logic with the logic of things.
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All direct and conscious intervention of whatever kind, at least when it comes from the state, is discredited in advance and thus condemned to efface itself for the benefit of a pure and anonymous mechanism, the market, whose nature as a site where interests are exercised is forgotten. But in reality, what keeps the social order from dissolving into chaos, despite the growing volume of the endangered population, is the continuity or survival of those very institutions and representatives of the old order that is in the process of being dismantled, and all the work of all of the categories of social workers, as well as all the forms of social solidarity, familial or otherwise.
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AlterNet: Sex and Relationships: Pornography and the End of Masculinity - 0 views
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As is often the case, this paradox can be resolved by recognizing that one of the assumptions is wrong. Here, it's the assumption that U.S. society routinely rejects cruelty and degradation. In fact, the United States is a nation that has no serious objection to cruelty and degradation. Think of the way we accept the use of brutal weapons in war that kill civilians, or the way we accept the death penalty, or the way we accept crushing economic inequality. There is no paradox in the steady mainstreaming of an intensely cruel pornography. This is a culture with a well-developed legal regime that generally protects individuals' rights and freedoms, and yet it also is a strikingly cruel culture in the way it accepts brutality and inequality.The pornographers are not a deviation from the norm. Their presence in the mainstream shouldn't be surprising, because they represent mainstream values:
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