Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. This is by popular demand (Translation: Lambert asked me to do this)
In this first post, we start human behavior from a microsociological perspective – the view from below (I have some more macro stuff later). The very fact of being in the presence of others influences what we do and how we think of ourselves in profound ways. In other words, the sociological approach described here focuses on the architecture of everyday life : these aspects of life that we take for granted and are often invisible to us because they are so familiar but that sustain society in fundamental ways. Read more
"They call it the prairie look: big hair, long dresses, and any colour you like, so long as it’s pastel. Now the women of a Texas polygamist sect are cashing in on their recent infamy by launching a children’s fashion label. The austere clothes, first showcased when inhabitants of the Yearning for Zion ranch flounced up Eldorado’s courtroom steps in an attempt to regain custody of 463 of their children, yesterday became available to the public through the organisation’s online shop. Read more
Via the Guardian, the surveillance society is going global:
"A comprehensive transatlantic pact clearing the way for the unprecedented supply of private data on European citizens to the American authorities is to be promoted by France in support of the US-driven campaign to combat terrorism and transnational crime.
The French government is expected to use its six-month presidency of the EU, starting tomorrow, to build on 18 months of confidential negotiations between Washington and Brussels aimed at clearing the complex legal obstacles to the exchange of personal information with the Americans.
The controversial proposed pact, a "framework agreement" on common data protection principles, is likely to enable the Americans to access the credit card histories, banking details and travel habits of Europeans, although senior officials in Brussels deny US reports that the Americans will also be able to snoop on the internet browsing records of Europeans." Read more
Have I ever mentioned how much I dislike President Sarkozy and his administration?
Via Context Crawler, comes this article from the Washington Post, by Shankar Vedantam on happiness surveys. We take it for granted, and it is supported by surveys, that people tend to be happier when their economic situation is more secure and overall better. That is fairly uncontroversial. And right now, the economy stinks, gas prices are through the roof, so, the mood is on the gloomy side. Straightforward as well. If the economy were better, people would be happier. What is the paradox then? Read more
Ok, Correntians, this is one of these long and substantial posts of mine where one of you shows up in the comments and summarizes the whole thing in 2 lines… making me look like a blabbering fool!
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts on reports - most of the time by IRIN - on the deplorable conditions under which women and girls live in many parts of the world. However, the articles have been piling up in my Newsreader, so, it’s time for one. So here we go: Read more
In his presentation, Robinson contrasted his approach to globalization as qualitatively different phenomenon (transnationalism) as opposed to the school of thought he labeled "new imperialism." Robinson’s view of globalization involves specific features:
the rise of truly transnational capital with integration of all countries into that system;
the rise of the transnational state (TNS) where class power is exercised through networks and by the transnational capitalist class (TCC - especially its political / executive component);
the development of new relations of power and inequalities on a global scale
the increased power of the transnational corporation (TNC)
So, for the maths-oriented among us: Globalization = TNS + TNC + TCC = true transnationalism. Read more
This really makes me sad. I am a huge fan of George Carlin. I will miss his curmudgeonly attitude, his lack of patience for religious stupidity and wonderful use of all the subtleties and absurdities of the English language to unveil our social ills. Read more
Two good pieces on Al Qaeda landed in my Newsreader this week and they both point in the same direction, albeit in different terms. The first one is from Tony Karon who questions the current relevance of Al Qaeda as the big post-9/11 bogeyman. For Karon, Al Qaeda is irrelevant and always was. In this respect, Al Qaeda is comparable to Trotsky… Huh? How does the comparison apply?
"Al-Qaeda is irrelevant, and yet U.S. hegemony in the Middle East is facing an unprecedented challenge from Islamist-nationalist groups. To understand the link between al-Qaeda’s weakness and the greatly expanded strength of groups such as Hamas, Hizballah, the Muslim Brotherhood and, of course, Iran, over the past seven years, it’s worth turning to the 20th century precedent: Leon Trotsky and his followers vs. the larger, nationally-focused parties of the left in the mid 20th century.
Trotsky rejected pragmatism and compromise by nationally-based leftist movements and insisted, instead, that they subordinate their specific national interests and objectives to the fantasy of “world revolution.” And as a result, long before his murder by Stalin, he found himself holed up in Mexico City, manically firing off communiques denouncing all compromise, and being largely ignored by the more substantial parties of the left world-wide. He had become an irrelevant chatterbox, caught up in a frenzy of his own rhetoric while world events simply passed him by. The same can be said of Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri — it is not al-Qaeda, but the likes of Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, and the Muslim Brotherhood that represent the future of the nationalist-Islamist challenge to Western power in the Middle East."
What makes Al Qaeda seemingly powerful are two factors: the one mentioned by Karon, that is, the fact that the United States treats Al Qaeda as this omnipresent threat of global proportion and reacts to every action as if it were the beginnings of a terrorist apocalypse. The second one, which I think is relevant here and contributes to the first, is that fact that Al Qaeda, being a non-state group, articulates itself opportunistically to nation-based movements (Algeria, Philippines, Indonesia, or Iraq). Read more
(Via Le Monde) Today, the Council of Europe launched a campaign against most forms of corporal punishment, including slapping, spanking, hitting, mistreating, humiliating and any other practice that damage the dignity of a child. The campaign will consist in TV ads , the publication of a manual for parents on violence-free parenting as well as materials for parliamentarians of the Council’s 47 member countries. Read more
I watched The Devil’s Miner (website) last night for the first time (it was originally from 2005) and what a film this is. The central question of the film is
How do we live in dignity?
Especially when you are 14 years old, living in Potosi, Bolivia, and you work at a mine inCerro Rico, "the mountain that eats men"? The mines there have been exploited for 450 years and are responsible for 8 million dead. Initially, exploited by the Spaniards, the mines were taken over by the Indios (indigenous peoples) and run as cooperatives but it is still as dangerous and it is still drudgery.
The film’s central character is Basilio He is 14 and has been working in the mines since he was ten. He lost his father when he was two, so, now, he is the father in the family, so much so that his little sister, Vanessa, calls him "papa". He works with his little brother Bernardino, who is twelve (also in the mines). The boys go to school for half a day and spend the rest of the time working in the mines. Read more
It is detrimental, says Thilo Thielke in Der Spiegel, because it creates unfairness and dependency in many different ways. First, using the case of Kenya, Thielke invokes a classical concept of formal organizational behavior: self-perpetuation.
"The roads are in horrid disrepair, and they’ll stay that way for a while. As a result, it would take days or even weeks to get the corn from the west to the northern parts of the country. But why would they need it there anyway? There’s a shortage in the north because the World Food Program is usually there to hand out food for free. The UN’s employees are paid to fight hunger, and that’s why they usually write reports in which they dramatically portray the situation in Africa and which they usually end with appeals demanding more donated food.
These developmental aid workers, whose reports largely shape our image of Africa, behave this way to a certain extent out of an instinct for self-preservation that they believe the Africans don’t have. Without help, they say, all the Africans will starve. And, indeed, without aid, all the helpers would also be out of a job."
A first problem then is that the persistent handing out of free food (largely surplus from Western countries) eliminates any incentives to be locally self-sufficient. And there is also the idea that the WFP needs people to be hungry in order to justify its existence and work (and some well-paying jobs for UN consultants). Even if some adventurous local entrepreneur tried to start local food production in an area with a numerous malnourished or under-nourished population, the results would likely be disastrous: Read more
The highlight of the second panel I attended on the World Social Forum was the presentation of Mike Menser on the internationalization of solidarity economics.
First, let me provide a primer on solidarity economics with the examples of Via Campesina . the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) and Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (Wikipedia). Solidarity economics starts from the World Social Forum that "another world is possible" and applies to it to economics. The idea is that it is possible to organize economies around principles different than that of global capitalism. According to Ethan Miller, these alternatives already exist:
"Can thousands of diverse, locally-rooted, grassroots economic projects form the basis for a viable democratic alternative to capitalism? It might seem unlikely that a motley array of initiatives such as worker, consumer, and housing cooperatives, community currencies, urban gardens, fair trade organizations, intentional communities, and neighborhood self-help associations could hold a candle to the pervasive and seemingly all-powerful capitalist economy. These "islands of alternatives in a capitalist sea" are often small in scale, low in resources, and sparsely networked. They are rarely able to connect with each other, much less to link their work with larger, coherent structural visions of an alternative economy." Read more
The Global Studies Association conference is actually interesting because it still human-sized (unlike the ASA), so, there aren’t too many sessions, you can attend most of them, the attendance is not monstrous, so you get to talk to the speakers, and quite a few prestigious ones too.
This year’s conference, at Pace University in New York City, was titled The Nation in the Global Era. So, of course, the big question, which has been hotly debated ever since the academic recognition of globalization as a significant phenomenon (itself a hotly debated topic), was that of the relevance of the modern nation-state in the global era. In a more nuanced fashion, the sessions centered around the transformation, role and relevance of the nation-state in the global context. Read more
As it happens, (and in light of today’s endorsement) Naomi Klein has a column in the Guardian regarding Obama’s economic policies. And she’s not impressed, to say the least: Read more
Since I have just received my DVD of this great film, I thought I’d re-post the review I wrote at The Global Sociology Blog.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a wonderful and harrowing adaptation of the book of the same name by Jean-Dominique Bauby (“Jean-Do”, as everyone calls him). Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor of the French fashion magazine Elle when, at 43, he had a major stroke that put him in a coma for three weeks. When he finally regained consciousness, he was suffering from a rare condition named “locked-in syndrome”: his mind was intact but he was completely paralyzed, from head to toe.
Read more
Elizabeth Pisani’s The Wisdom of Whores - Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS is a great book (along with a great website). Elizabeth Pisani is an epidemiologist with years of experience working on HIV/AIDS (or sex and drugs, as she puts, which sounds a lot, well, sexier) at a variety of agencies, including UNAIDS. The book is the story of her frustrations at the way the international community, national governments, NGOS and AIDS activists have dealt with the epidemics, as well as her hopes in some of the progress made.
I got interested in the book when I read an interview Pisani gave to the Guardian. The interview kinda billed the book as a controversial work where Pisani would be the mean lady who said people got AIDS because of their stupid behavior and not enough was being done because of political correctness. So, I was ready to get really pissed off with the book. That has not been the case at all. Read more
I’m feel so moved! Unfortunately, he’s not very bright. This was his response to my WWTSBQ 2.0 - Neverending Story… hold on to your seats:
“I’d like to keep things as civil as possible, but I think these points deserve some discussion. I’d like to leave discussions of gender and race out if you please, and also issues of policy, because we would get off-topic. I want to talk about the delegate count and the nomination. Fact 1: there is no way for Hillary to win the majority of pledged delegates. I don’t think superdelegates should override the will of the voters, but they have been coming out more and more strongly for Obama as this campaign has gone on. Read more
My blog bookmark listing is getting thinner every day. That goes along with the shrinking respect I had for some bloggers in the past. Boy has this primary been a reality check. Here is someone who used to be one of my favorite bloggers, Hilzoy, subbing for Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly : Read more
In case anyone has forgotten…This is only the last iteration of a long series of shameful lies and intimidations against Hillary by the media, the big Blogs and the Obama campaign. She’s immune to it. I’m not. I’m furious.
(Via 
I watched 
