spooky sense by garfucius

reading the mocha stains

2011-02-22T12:38:00.002+02:00

go to erkan's field diary for a reading of recent events in the region.

wow!.. that sounded pretentious didn't it? well, it's not really. just so you know garfucius will be hosted by erkan presently.

ex orientes lux! but moves westward...

2011-02-16T14:56:00.002+02:00

the surge of uprising in the maghreeb, levant, mesopotamia, arabia and now persia reminds me of albert camus’s epoch making book of the post world war II boom years, “l’homme révolté”.

to my mind, the entire book begins an ends in the first eight-word unit of question and answer: “what is a rebel? a man who says no”...

forgive me for using some blogger’s license and belaboring the obvious here, but i feel like pointing out that the philosopher, for me, the greatest of the 20th century) punctuates the logical impossibility of saying yes and at the same time revolting: anything man says “yes” to is binding, a reason to accept, rather than reject.

applied to the current case (so far) of the arabophonic mediterranean, iran and the yemen, the popular rebellion is only about saying no to the incumbent rulers and the particular mode of rule they have employed until now. i, for instance, cannot in good conscience, come forth and say that the peoples of the region are insurrecting against the regimes that not only nurtured and strengthened those absolute rulers but also spawned them.

“les hommes révolté” of yesteryear had freedom on their minds; perhaps an absurd, impossible, illogical, extreme, absolute freedom that brooked no boundaries. the mutineers of the maghreeb, levant, mesopotamia, arabia and persia seem to have a long way to go, before they can articulate their idea of freedom beyond exchanging new tyrants with the old... after all, what happened in iran 32 years ago, they still call a “revolution”.

İ am not trying to undersize the movement(s) in the maghreeb, levant, mesopotamia, arabia and persia under any circumstance. till this moment, masses in unison have dethroned two despots and are shaking several more thrones, which is an achievement in itself but may or may not turn into a victory dependent on the content of freedom the rebellion eventually generates. yes, i am partial to freedom and any supersedence that does not engender freedom is a loss for entire humanity, winning does not always mean victory. our ancestors who inhabited these lands taught the world, taught history the meaning of freedom. again, not far from the maghreeb, levant, mesopotamia, arabia and persia that have never truly possessed it, democracy as a praxis and process of freedom was created as a form of mind and life, native to the mediterranean.

ex orientes lux! hence shone the light of modernity, millennia ago.

ex orientes lux, however, it moves on toward the occident.

no wonder, we, all of us in the mediterranean, including the hellenic mediterranean, have to learn or re-learn democracy from those in the west, who learnt it from us.

players' democracy

2010-03-05T12:42:00.003+02:00

the objective of politics in turkey is to get a firm grip on the state as the seat of power and not relinquish it again. the latter is usually accomplished through deep rooted planting of confederates in the bureaucracy and in the longer run, by tilting the biases in the education system to favor you.

under the thoroughly anomalous "normal" system of politicking in turkey, supplication to the armed forces used to be one tested method of not falling too far from the avatars and pundits and hence, the perks of puissance. never was a government in the last 60 years that practically encouraged the rise or self nourishment of a capitalist (1) class structure upon which power could be perpetuated. during their rule, each party breast fed a group of cohorts, supporters and/or sympathizers to affluence, many of whom, like a match flare, burned out once their benefactors left government(2).

thus, an alternative social force to state power was never able to raise its head within an autonomous social sphere. the entire system, from economics to national interests, to cultural preferences and even to morals, was shaped according to state and government priorities.

social life was thus "officialized", hence also the individual and his way(s) of mind...

according to some, the latest surge by tayyib efendi, rosy & co. to effect the supposed ouster of the military from the circle of influence represents a "revolutionary" shift from the classical tradition of politics and a big step toward democratization (3).

i object - not only because the character-type epitomized by tayyib efendi, rosy & co. is incommensurate with emancipatory dissent (4) but also for the simple reason that there exist no such social forces to base a healthy democracy on. considering that such social forces need also to span a diverse cross section of the demos and be fairly audible and most importantly, audible while speaking through their own voice rather than hitching up to the governmet's orchestra as a chorus; the basic tenets of a pluralistic democracy especially one capable of dissension are totally missing. for whatever they count, foci of political oppsition and resistance are paramiltarily organized pockets of despotisms themselves.

history offers its parallels not in straight lines but in the as arrows through spatial geometry: in ottoman times, "intellectually bolstered" debates rationalizing power struggles among rivaling factions of pashas in the palace; biting each other's head off vying for the sultan's favors - heads literally rolled rather often, too. still the main element missing was the demos; which would elevate the populace from a mob into a force with its own structured and diversified demands relevant to fairly crystallized interests and the means, including force, to access the machinations of the political system.

tayyib efendi, rosy & co. seem only set to establish a system that consolidates power in and within the executive branch. the legislative, true to the nature of parlşiamentary democracies and particularly the bizarre nature of the turkish party system which empowers the leader with enough spunk befitting a dictator, is already totally dependent on the prime minister's whims; whomever he may be (5). now, the same legislative and the president who is the head of the executive, will be appointing two thirds of the country's highest judiciary bodies, if the constitutional changes envisaged by tayyib efendi, rosy & co. can take effect. if so, they will be able to play the judiciary around their fingers (6), and be just as powerful as the sultans whose word used to be the law and was unchallengeable (7).

tayyib efendi, rosy and co. seem intent to institute a "patrimonial (8) regime",where politics, as it used to be in absolutism, is a closed-circuit game only for those included in the decision making process: a players' democracy where once the ballot is in, anybody but the élite players can only sit back and watch. this kind of politics which nevertheless derives its legitimacy from some sort of public vote affords the players a near absoulte latitude (9).

according to the potents and pundits, parliamentary selection of high judges will reflect the "nation's will" onto the judiciary. actually, the justice system exists less - if at all - to represent the public in numbers but safeguard (10) its express wills through the supervision of the way the laws passed by parliaments are respected in practice, not only by the public but alos by their elected administrators.

but then again, it all comes down to the askew, skewered political system of turkey.
the gist of the matter is dissembling the absolute power of the state apparatus in a manner that it cannot concentrate again on any certain focus, be it the clergy, religious sects, bureaucrats, labor unions, business, etc., but is distributed through a state-of-law to the entire community and to each individual, favoring the demos.

upon which, more is to come later...

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(1) thence, a labor
(2) of course, some mainstay businesses and businessmen/families were always upheld as conduits to the world-economy, because without them, the state-heavy system would be in jeopardy, too. however, this qualifies more as "wealth generation" than the existence of a true capitalist social - historical system
(3) i am not so naive to believe that the current effort to castrate the military's political virility can produce a decisive shift in the balance of power. not only the "will of the nation" behind tayyib efendi, rosy & co. is rather inconclusive in its attitude toward a non-custodian military, the akp’s social base is more slippery than it ever was. indeed, tayyib efendi, rosy & co. owe their preponderance less to their own prowess than the total disability of the current political opposition and the absence of an alternative. the prosecution of well respected generals with rather unsatisfactory cases in a kangaroo court manner raises the possibility of mass acquittals; which would not only countermand current their mass arrests but also would clear the military in the eyes of the public of any wrong doing. even in chile where the public is far better versed in democratic traditions, the stamp of augusto pinochet is still carried by his lingering specter.
(4) the akp represents the political movement of a social segment that has been denied state privileges since the 17th century and has thus been able to develop into a social demand organized around a conservative rhetoric with pronounced islamic intonations rather than a class, using the marxist lexicon, "of and/or for itself". therefore, their demands. although claiming to change society prioritizes enlarging their lebensraum by appropriating state instruments, rather than providing liberal space to society by curbing the might of the state.
(5)for fairness's sake i have to note that any supposedly "potential" pm, i.e., the leader of even the smallest political party is still afflicted with the same disease caused and abated by the current laws that are the ill legacy of the last military junta of 1980.
(6) the legislative and executive practically "appointing" judges is no less similar and more reasonable than allowing high court justices automatically being named parliament or cabinet members. except, that way parliament is not liekly to be an "assembly of judges" or a "cabinet of magistrates", whereas this way, the absolute power of a prime minister controlling all three estates will resemble the arbitrary might of a charlemagne...
(7) even then, the sultans, if so they wished, would feel bound by the laws they and their ancestors issued.
(8) from maxweber, a society where the chief exercizes his near total authority through an élite administrator class as opposed to patriarchalism where his athority is personal as paternal.
(9) order and cohesion in such societies are based on authority and hierarchies rather than a covenant and contract and wherever or whenever authority becomes lax, anomies is ever present. power hirearchies and their illegal - illegitimate projections or extensions are exempt from laws to varying degrees therefore the man on the street is often crushed under the weight of laws as well as lawlesness.
contemporary examples are limited to the third world, of course: russia, malaysia, iran; etc., where elections decide who the next tyrants will be and rule without really being bound by any norms except the basic and brutest rules of power.
(10) that is why the only logical and just way of picking justices for any and each level of courts of law is to devise a method whereby they are elected by other judges and jurists; i.e., organizations representing public and private attorneys at law.

blind spot!

2010-03-03T13:48:00.002+02:00

garfucius spent the last four months semi-blind and that sure creates problems!

as pertinent to this blog, the last post was published in the turkish section, for instance. now that vision is better, things are falling back in place; if anybody cares.

my apologies for the error.

democracy? who wants to be a homo?

2010-03-03T13:47:00.000+02:00

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

at least one theory of politics (1) maintains that over half a century of cold war which allegedly divided the world between the u.s.a. and the soviets, was sort of a mutually beneficial arrangement that consolidated the hegemony of each side within its camp, and of the relative preponderance of the u.s. between the two. when the “arrangement” outlived its usefulness, the system collapsed and the wall fell.

that sense of “mutual in domicile beneficiarism” washed over me as i was browsing through the paper this morning. in hurriyet, ahmet hakan coskun, who transferred (according to some, converted) to the mainstream from “militant” islamism, commented that premier tayyip erdogan’s wife emine hanım was discouraged from visiting a patient lying in a military hospital because of ther turban she wears. coskun complained, if the spouse of turkey’s head of government can be banished from an official institution under her husband’s command, it is moot to speak of any threats from “civilian fascism” (2) in that country.

in another, adjacent comment, coskun also wrote that being as closely affiliated with erdogan’s akp as possible “serves one to come forth in government contracts, coveted appointments, to rise to positions, to get on to the (prime minister’s) airplane (3), to be included in the nouveaux riche class and to become elected for offices”.

knowingly or unwittingly, the ex (or crypto?) islamist columnist painted identical triangles with the cold war and the civil cold war in turkey; between two separate and discreet domains where, seemingly. “the twain ne’er meet”.

to the civilized western mind. conditioned in organized, cartesian parameters, the unending chaotic, repetitive and grossly counterproductive struggle between turkey’s military and political élites may seem too complex. i do recall reading dispatches of foreign correspondents that still naively depicted the akp as a veteran of democracy and freedoms – even claudia roth thought so at one time, though she seems to have wisened up now.

it’s garfucius’s duty to clarify: in the third and a half world, where ordinary people and their government officials are unable to manage even traffic, the simplest social organization of the homo sapiens, democracy can not elevate to the status of a consumer good in high demand (4).

hence, the seemingly democratic or secularist skirmish is nothing more than an ice cold game of grab-their-power-do-not-relinquish-yours.

naturally, it is a lose-lose game… tayyib efendi,rosy and co. wish for an army at full abeyance to them and mainly, if not only them. the generals and their cohorts would love a government that upholds a 1920’s style étatisme, under military auspices, where the state controls everything, including the decisions of who will “come forth in government contracts, get appointed to favored posts, rise to positions, get on to the (prime minister’s) airplane, be included in the nouveaux riche class and be elected for office”.

even the “religious approach” the sides adopt is similar – only, tayyib efendi,rosy and co. favor a fervent pro-islamic parlance whereas the militarist – étatist clan affects a decorous, epic, kemalist-nationalist discourse.

and a real, working democracy, a true rule-by-law that actually will do away with the paranoid fears and anxieties as well as the vested privileges of both sides in our civil cold war, is still as far as a rainbow to walk under.

also, as unreachable as it is undesirable – in turkish folk lore, your sex will change if you walk under the rainbow. in case accidents occur – and in the third and a half world, they are prone to, it is safer to stick to whomever and wherever you are… after all, who wants to be a homo?

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(1) chief proponent, robert cox; criticized – not so justly – for failing to explain why and how then, the wall fell; actually explained before 1989 by immanuel wallerstein with the global spread of the capitalist modern world system and the inability of the socialist bloc to keep up with its economic and (geo)cultural appeal.
(2) basically though, fascism is civilian in origin – both mussolini and hitler created their own loyalist armies. even franco’s falangistas can essentially be considered civilian militias. İt is more after the sprout of post-colonial states in the third world that the distinction between fascist militia and utterly militarist military juntas faded; with each and every bandung member going through or still suffering from authoritarian regimes. actually, i think the term, which apparently is gai,ning some permanence in our vocabulary, should be converted in english as civilian authoritarianism.
(3) to be able to fly with erdogan on his designated jet is indeed a door opener for business”men” on the rise and budding or established supplicants in the media.
(4) in the very early 1950s, the colossal research work “the authoriatarian personality” was swiftly swept under the carpet when it unearthed severely unpleasant fascistic traits in a good number of americans; including antisemitism. however, the study indicated that authoritarian or fascistic rule is not possible without a consenting public. just take a look at iran to see how true it is… and oh, please, the greens are fighting ahmadinajad extremism, not oppression in general by an islamist regime.
Posted by Galip at 4:27 AM 0 comments

teflon obama?.. garfucius is coming back!..

2009-08-26T13:56:00.003+03:00

hussein obama seems to be the democratic latter day version of a teflon president. it seems to me after two thirds of a year, he is less capable of doing things right than letting right things drop in the right spots by themselves.

still three and change years ahead but i wager he's gonna be re-elected only if the reps do a "kerry" on him; i.e., return the favor democrats did to dubya in '04 by nominating an obvious loser. republicans should come up with a bu-lin from somewhere, combining he best of bush & palin.

hussein makes a great media magnet but where world affairs are concerned, clinton's billy still looks like the real ringer... i mean hillary clinton's of course...

see, it's taking time but...

garfucius is coming back!

yo! ho! and beware... garfucius is coming back!

2009-08-23T13:22:00.002+03:00

garfucius is ready too shake the dust off the soles of his feet and return to the trek and the quest... to spread the virtues of outrageousness.

for instance... have you noticed how similar the political functions of imam ghazali and kung-fu-tzu (better known as confucius) have been?

soon on this blog!..

coincidence? or the wisdom of folly?

2009-01-31T13:34:00.003+02:00

while turkey is engrossed in a heated and obnoxious debate over tayyib efendi's davos walkout on pres. shimon peres and how diplomatically unbecoming and philistine (1) his behavior is - though also endearing touncouth, sycophantic, aggrieved and outraged hordes of losers; i came accross an article by prof. alexander nazaryan (2) about how wine could be a resource in classical times to help moot suchpubliic and potentially embarrassing outbursts as from both pres. peres andp.m. tayyib efendi.

nazaryan writes, according to james davidson (3) in the wealthier households of athens (4), "men of stature" would engage in lively debate, as bowls of wine were "dispensed under the careful watch of a symposiarch (a sort of strict toastmaster)... " as depicted in plato’s “symposium” where socrates and his friends, "still hung over from the previous night’s carousing, decide on an evening of light drinking". temperance pays off: in the ensuing discussion, they summon an overarching vision of love that has endured in the western imagination for more than two millennia" (5).

but then, as the japanese say, no rules in love or war...

enter alkibiadis in the symposium, young and handsome. he "drunkenly tries to cozy up to the older socrates", with "no patience for his prurient come-ons and intimations". alkibiadis was eventually subdued; only to be pursued by a group of boozy revelers bursting in. then “there was noise everywhere, and everyone started drinking in no particular order,” grumps a plaintive plato, the voice of moderation. according to the philosopher, the party ended unceremoniously because thus the "love of drink overpowered love of truth". so much for the platonic version of "in vino veritas"...

however, maybe "alithea" (6) is less in what wine does (or in plato's pro-temperance case, does not) makes us say than in what it makes us do: for, thus spake homeros through odysseus of ithaka :

(wine) sets the wisest man to sing at the top of his lungs,
laugh like a fool – it drives the man to dancing…it even
tempts him to blurt out stories better never told.

nazaryan, referring to the immortal e. r. (eric robertson but he always used his initials only) dodds remarks "for the greeks, a measure of irrationality in the dionyssiac form of wine drinking checked the (absolute) rule of reason".

garfucius tends to differ slightly: if you are a child or an amante of the aegean, you realize how rationality is but a mere method to maintain sanity over the beauty proceeding from that sea and the life she nurtures. one has to experience the urge to dissolve in, maybe sacrifice one's soul and being to her eternal light and glamor, in order to comprehend what a burden sanity is in tthe face of sheer, unadulterated beauty... how it arises from that consuming passion the aegean instills in her lovers and bestows you with the persona, so you can act upon her stage... wine is not fluvial in that manner; it is the vessel, the holy grail, from which through sense and ratio, you may drink the joy that defines the life that is her, and keeps you floating on a ship like odysseus the unwary explorer - that ship is called rationality and it won't sail with sobriety.

that is why, "in vino, veritas", as is wisdom in folly.

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(1) no need to intend a pun, it is there...
(2) "the tipsy hero", nyt, january 30, 2009. i do not know if mr. nazaryan is a professor at some college but i use the title in its generic sense, as teacher.
(3) courtesans & fishcakes: the consuming passions of classical athens
(4) probably no less in ephesus or bergamon or korinthos either...
(5) love is dual natured, it is both ephemeral and eternal andd therefore a bridge between those two worlds - just as is philosophy. for the purposes of this post, so is wine...
(6) truth

hussein's 100 hours

2009-01-25T18:34:00.002+02:00

it is an american custom to cut a president some slack in the first 100 days of office before judging him too harshly.

with barack hussein obama though, it seems it took less than 100 hours in the oval office to establish himself an image as a decent leader for the u.s. and the world. even the israeli cease- fire in gaza and subsequent troop withdrawals, although with no direct and overt prompting on the part of obama's administation, apparently is written to his credit. his resolute closure of gitmo (2), determined atttempts to grapple the economic slump, even the spectacular inauguration party have evidently endeared him to a larger public than merely his contituents.

obama is not a landslide victor. he won a clear but not so overwhelming election majority. still, the confidence vested in him was spared even from bill clinton (1). the world practically expects hussein to set everything awry right again, as if he wields a magic wand. and the way he started, it is almost as if he does and he can.

as a matter of fact, if he plays it right, most "problems" plaguing america on a global scale require not much more than good leadership initiative, based mainly on good ideas that can render mutual beneficiarism a fine option. in other cases, that carrot just has to be tied to a stick "big" enough to allow for "soft speaking"; i.e., leadership with a firm hand that is not miserly when tipping. it is a fact that eight years of dubya cost too much in terms of american credibility and authority that must be restored. yet, hussein's first 100 hours have been encouraging and promising for the initiatory steps he can take in almost any direction, in the first 100 days.

probably since fdr, no president has had to carry such a load as obama, where every move he makes can affect the fate of all people in the world. at least he looks like he is light on his feet, if weighed down by the burden.

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(1) even in pre-monica times!
(2) instant leaked stories that released gitmo detainees flock with al kaida are an active indicator that obama's move is right. if the comings and goings to that ghost organization were really monitored so vigorously, those who join it should already have joined the ranks of ghosts or at least turncoats. the smell in the first 100 hours may thus raise the spectre of the hope that the paranoia clique in washington may be losing its grip on shaping reality.

if might makes right...

2009-01-20T17:32:00.003+02:00

there is a comment on the post "gaza and the evil of choice" below.

the comment by mr. khazen calls to mind a few issues that i should rather clarify: first, i do not believe in "terrorism". acts that are construed by political pundits as terrorism are either one form or another of war or acts that constitute a crime, a felony. the two rather meld, actually, for war in itself is the biggest and wholesale crime... albeit, without a punishment to speak of (1).

if the premise in any situation, case, problem, dilemma whatever is that "might makes right" and battle is the way to might, every phenomenon has to be judged by that criterion.

the kernel of "might", though, lies beyond a mere physical (military, diplomacy, police, arsenal, intelligence, etc.) strength to coerce. might is also an abstract capacity to influence outcomes by influencing the way people feel, think, live and experience the world - science is might. art is might. aesthetics is might. a deliciou cuisisne is might. a beautiful woman is might. anything that expands and enriches the possible field of human experience, what existential/phenomenologist jargon records as "noemasis" is might.

israel is a legitimate political entity. in terms of "pure", muscular might, israel is right. it has won three all-out wars against arab powers that at least on paper, were incomparably stronger. it has waged another and longer war against the belligerency of the plo and yassir arafat. it has successfully maneuvered to devoid the philistines of the support of arabs through clever usage of diplomatic opportunities (2). when the going got rough, it was usually the israeli forces that came on top from clashes, even beirut in 2007 is scantly classifiable as a definitive defeat.

israel has committed atrocious acts during these wars but the effect of those crimes have largely evaporated inside the greater crime, the war - not because people are vilely pro-israel but because a stupid interpretation of history accords a totally unreasonable dose of totally undeserved legitimacy to war.

the philistines, on the other hand, have constantly lost in the battlefields. they also have committed atrocious deeds which are an inevitable, even natural collateral of war. they have also committed atrocious deeds which are not any inevitable or natural collateral of war against uninvolved parties. therefore, their atrocities are remembered as "philistine terrorism". that made pariahs of the philistines for decades, not because they were constant losers, not because their diplomacy was incompetent (3) but because the philistines and their supporters failed to convince the world of their non-violent might since, if anything, they had too little to contribute to the welfare and well being of humanity in general.

to every arab novelist, at least a hundred jews prevail; to each doctor, maybe thousands, same for artists, rocket physicists, playwrites, captains, football players, orchestra conductors etc.,
etc.

and humor. the israeli and jews in general are quite capable of turning self mockery into universal comedy - which is an extension of an ability to be critically introspective. not much in that department can be said in praise of arabs or more generally, muslims either.

to sum, israel won all the military battles - and possibly the war, too-; it also gained a place in people's minds that accords them the land they live on. whether it is promised or not is a moot debate, it is a land that they won. so go the spoils of war.

similarly, the world recognized the philistines' right to their own land and state and did a lot to pressure israel to acknowledge that right, as well.

with hamas, though, they decided to gamble on that gain and lost again. first, they lost their unity, now their credibility. except the obvious suspects, even those most critical of israel hardly utter a word in support of hamas (4). to it goes none of the sympathy extended to victims.

personally, i am adamantly anti-hamas and anti-iran. that does not make me particularly pro-israeli. but given the choice between a philosophy represented by the former of venerating death and destruction and by israel of a life far more worth enjoying; i cast my ballot along with a world that is capable of thinking as well as feeling.

my heart, too, goes to the innocent, the helpless, the destitute of gaza and their misery. however, my sympathy can achieve too little; too deep are the roots of hate and loathing that allows hamas and its likes their bloody playgrounds, for even a chimerical philistine victory to obliterate.

that leaves me one option: to reason. and i do not believe that my line of reasoning is faultier than that of hamas and its supporters, who still have nothing to advocate but war and seek victory in the havoc they have caused their fellow philistines.

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(1) sort of makes "war crimes" an oxymoron, right? the best that humanity, even in "modern" times, could come up was blame atrocities on vanquished commanders; thus but adding to the false legitimacy of the original and generic atrocity.
(2) israel's main tactical failure so far, is allowing the philistines to divide between fatah and hamas, allowing the latter a margin of legitimacy in the region's affairs as iran's lackey.
(3) the sole arab diplomatic victory is the 1973 oil embargo which only backfired and in essence, the embargo was another form of sable rattling. as a matter of fact, any political progress the arabian side has made since 1967 is the consequence of western and essentially american initiatives to resolve the middle east issue.
(4) one rare and vocal advocate of hamas, turkey's premier tayyib efendi seems to have lost considerable sympathy at home and abroad and is likely to face america's cold shoulder in upcoming political or financial deals.

qou vadimus?

2009-01-16T13:43:00.002+02:00

(please read or browse through the precedent post as well)

some obvious points that nevertheless might require a little belaboring:

* the arab and muslim world has reached a bifurcation. theirs is no longer an expedient choice between the warring cliques of philistines. the arab and muslim world now has to choose between israel, no less, and the militant factions/states that currently rally behind hamas [or hizbullah, or islamic jihad or al kaida (1) at some time or other]. the real choice lies deeper than that, of course. israel is the representative of modernity.

* there is no way the divide of philistines will heal in the near future. the abbasi half will receive more of what is getting, while gaza will be allowed to sink back into poverty and misery, less because of israel than that it suits hamas better. after cease-fire, there will be a flood of relief material into the strip, which hamas and its administering officers will usurp, abuse, waste or steal; leaving the populace sick and hungry again.

* the divide among arabs is not transitory. in another age, say, the late 20th century, it could have been manipulated into an all-out armed confrontation among the cliques, similar to iraq's invasion of kuwait, that would result in even more effective subjugation to the west, of the sort saudi arabia has gone under after kuwait. no such threat today although that does not mean unity, concord and consent are closer to the arab world.

* the arab divide is mainly representative of the position the sides adopt vis-a-vis modernity and its outcasts. the "moderate" arab-muslim world has managed to progress (regress?) into more wealth and less modernity (2) in the last half decade, thanks to dubious dubya on his way out. so, they can hardly be an essential component or a deciding agent in the modern camp they must adhere to. there, of course, is no likelihood of throwing their stock in with hamas alias iran. in all cases iran is too great a threat and all their viable assets are invested in the west anyway. furthermore, oil is not drinkable or edible. you have to sell it if it is to do any good..

* as a corollary, do not put much stock in qatar's gambit to adopt a role as slightly pro-hamas-because-it-is-from-palestine spokesman in the middle east. it is adversely influenced by iran's proximity and dubai's rise to prominence without even any oil to speak of. it has to tread carefully. tit comes to tat, qatar has to cling to the west, no choice!

* for that matter, algerian and libyan support for hamas is more rhetoric than brawn. negligible.

* as can be expected, syria still is the forerunning advocate of the hamas - irani position (if you discount tayyib efendi, rosy and co., who, supposedly in the name of islamic solidarity are a step short of declaring war on israel!..). with iran's fortunes down though, and syria the only nation in the world whose wealth is stagnant for decades, bashar assad can be said to be mainly blowing smoke. once the clouds clear and he can maintain a face saving defiance, he will again welcome talks with israel.

* even among the so called militant arabs, there will never be a common position that goes beyond rhetorical condemnation of israel and unavailing international moves, say in the u.n. whatever resolution or joint declaration comes forth will simply re-chew the 40-odd year old spiel against israeli occupation. the doha arab summit and similar future meetings are and will be to an extent, to blow some wind off iran's sails after all.

* the non-modern moderate arabs are not necessarily anti-modern. so once dubya goes out and hussein obama begins to wring them into a more malleable shape, they will have to issue political changes and buy their place into some modern fora. they will also have to finance palestine into a moderate existence, until israeli favors to the zone can be accepted and open up a chance of coexistence again. keep in mind though, that is solely at the discretion of israel.

* soon, before or around hussein's 21 january inauguration, there will be cease fire. israel will not of course, have been able to eradicate all origins of paramilitary action against it but is likely to have established some channels of control for the aftermath of its occupation. the military ends will have to be at least 80 percent realized before truce if the incursion is to serve any goal.

* now laugh if you will but "true" relief to gaza can only be managed effectively and at least partly supplied by israel. it should be remembered how israeli jobs helped feed palestine for years until the epidemic of human bombs began. israel has the largest stake in a fairly satisfied gaza public, more in providing their satisfaction right now. however, to do that with hamas entrenched there is impossible. gazai philistines are therefore doomed to more suffering in the hands (also because) of their leaders.

* negotiations will begin. israel's main concern is the militant arabs' and iran's rejection of its right to existence. even if the anti-israeli authorities of hamas etc. officially concede that, militant outlaw bands they feed and support will not fold in. in that case, israel will seek other guarantees from other sources.

* israel has to and probably will ensure the cooperation of some moderate arabs with clout, at least of egypt in guaranteeing its borders and security against hamas and the like. for instance, the gaza border will have to be policed by egypt against contraband likely to be used against israel. obama's currently rampant popularity will help that.

* the sad fact is that hamas has no real case to argue at the time except dead children. heart breaking as it is, that position will practically be a matter of the past as soon as negotiations open. sooner or later, it will be forced to accept the major conditions israel advances, not without open or secret pressure from its newly vocal allies as qatar for example. however, a pacifistic and passive hamas is a dead duck. it will be disrobed even of its rhetoric of "murdered children and bereaved mothers". worse, the funds channeled to it for buying arms will not be flowing as generously for food and medicine. the people of gaza will be taken care of by the west, instead. hamas will either escalate its aggressive discourse and "terrorist" acts or fade away.

* unless the iranians are so fond of stoning women who are supposed to be adulteresses and therefore vote in mahmoud ahmadinajad again, expect changes in that direction after dubya.

* whatever happens, a deep gash will separate the modern world from its fringes, both physicallly and mentally. even turkey, closest in all aspects to the west, has already forfeited its chance of joining the eu prefering to harp on its islamic orientations, for instance. the arabs will be kept proximal but happy enough (2).

* time has come for the world to change speech habits as well. the politically correct will have to fade and give way to harsh realities exchanged in feverish but non-violent communication. tolerance that grew rank with indifference is likely to alter a course toward productive clash to reach better consensus and taking responsibility for the other. and that might be the only way to bridge the m odern - non modern gap.

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(1) just as a reminder, the attack on the twin towers on 9-11 was popularly celebrated in many arab countries as a victory over sionists and their allies. governments quickly banned such festivities for fear of worsening their world image and relations with washington. however, the number of newborn boys named osama exploded. if that is not public support for al kaida...
(2) which is not synonymous with owning or being able to afford most expensive modern toys, gadgets and weaponry or even modern factories, as is the custom in the middle east.
(3) more to come on this.

gaza and the evil of choice

2009-01-15T12:48:00.005+02:00

we are probably about to enter the last week of "true" fighting, re israel's incursion into the gaza strip. some observations:

* there is no war in human history where civilian casualties are nil. therefore, there cannot be a humane war, whether you sign agreements in geneva or go sailing in genoa.

* life is not fair or humane either. what we call fair, just, legitimate, legal, moral etc. are all constructs that proceed from covenants that somehow enable the species to live together. otherwise, the homo sapiens sapiens is even more savage toward its own than coyotes or sharks or any creature for that matter, with the exception in very exceptional situations, of rats.

* a fair, humane, just life is not a prerogative of being born a neonate of the homo sapiens. it is a privilege accorded to the individual who conforms to certain and ceritified standards of genetics and behavior we usually refer as "culture". such privilege has been extended to the greatest number of homo sapiens only in two stages of history:

1- the very mythical "golden age" that adorns every folklore from hellas to scandia. the tale is that, once heroism ruled and everyone was happy. then, heroes took over and of course, gold turned to lead.

2- the so-called age of modernity, that i (in the wake of a group of historians) believe, emerged first in the hellenic lands of antiquity and re-sprouted some five centuries ago in europe to encompass other eurogenic cultures as well. modernity, simply, is the proportional logic of mathematics applied to all covenants of collective living. the modern covenant is basically described (1) by choice, freedoms, equality, competition, merit and the rule of law. privileges are shaved off and staved off. the individual, every individual can become the master of his fate - should he so choose - and free to act as he wills within the covenant (2).

thus, equality of all before the law affords the individual a chance to establish a fair, just, equitable collective ambience for life. despite its monotonous, impassionate, impartial objectivity that is mortally impersonal; modernity, then, becomes the privilege for the individuals that benefit from it - but only to the extent the individual can become the custodian of modern privileges and also the guardian of his "rights". thereby, the demos becomes the ruling force if not the agent. modernity is impossible without democracy.

* more important, democracy is not possible without a demos, i.e., a population sufficiently aware of its rights and their universality, i.e., applicability to everyone.

* in that light, the "war" in gaza is not a skirmish between the israeli and philistines any longer.
it is a clash representing a 500 year conflict between the modern and the non or anti modern. whatever heinous fate happens to the befall poor, innocent children of gaza, and other "uninvolved" civilians, they are the "collateral damage" in a battle that is cleaving a peremptory gash among known forms of social existence, or covenants.

* the immediate sides in this last battle are children whose parents can ask why and demand remedies if their children are murdered by foreign or friendly fire, on one hand. on the other are children whose fathers obey some ulterior authority that thrives on the bodies of children; and whose mothers perforce, obey their fathers.

* if the statement above sounds too harsh, some food for thought: why do tv cameras keep showing pictures of devastated children (and women) dug from under the rubble and next to them, yelling and frolicking and politicking men (i.e., males) who seem to be digging them out but do not have a speck of dust on their clothes? sort of makes one wonder if there were no room for the poor kids in the obviously safe shelters those men were hiding while the bombs fell?

* the human animal (as many others) is wired for compassion and empathy in order to survive. therefore, our hearts bleed for the children and other (presumed) innocents of gaza. yet, conscience is only a failsafe biological instrument for social adaptation that functions as a last resort, at the kill point. boncultural species (3) are generally capable of developing behavioral patterns and communication systems that check them from pushing animosities to the kill point, where members of the tribe are threatened with death. therefore, our hearts should have bled before, when it was still possible to prevent israel from jumping into gaza. for instance, when hamas bombs were beating ashkelon?.. they should have already bled when the notoriously brutal and bloody hamas was opted as the power to rule palestine. instead, we opted to hide behind that westphalian fallacy of "respect for sovereignty"; a.k.a., "let the snake that won't bite me devour its own offspring". hamas was elected as a savior (sic.) to replace the corrupt, evil, partisan and incompetent governments of the "charismatic hero" yasir arafat (and his more incompetent successor abbas) that coule secure no advantages for the philistines at least since 1988-1989. or else, they should start bleeding when idiots all over the world expected hamas to achieve anything other than what it was always doing; the same atrocities that prompted israel to bomb and enter gaza. if they did not bear leaving the children of gaza to the mercy of dubya the dubious who declared ariel "the butcher" sharon "a man of peace", our hearts should be bleeding when ehud barak fell into the grave arafat dug for him and help the hero of philistines forfend bill clinton's peace initiative on his valedictory days as president. and our bleeding hearts should keep in mind that these represent only a few of the occasions when something could be done to save palestine's kids from the bombs before they even fell. yes, the human animal is wired for compassion and empathy but conscience comes second to and complements intelligence. and intelligence demands solutions against bombs at times of peace, not when children are being torn to shreds while they are being used as human shields and propaganda fodder by their "fathers". it must be remembered that the "modern" covenant is superior only because the parties to it, i.e., the demos, i.e., every individual benefiting from it, has the right and the duty to inquire how that covenant is put into practice.

* unfortunately, the situation in palestine has reached such a fulcrum that any move by the "modern" collective, universal (at least global) mind can do little to encompass all its suffering children. hamas has made sure that the divide it has engineered severes at least one part of the philistines from a modern future in the foreseeable time. whatever relief may be "awarded" will befall those arabs and philistines that side up with the modern world, although they have scantly any chance of becoming a part of it.

* let me repeat: once one is on the war path, there is no good any more. all is evil. whatever the cause, there can simply be no "just" war; it is a bankruptcy of reason. at that point, the equation is simplistically simple: live or die... unless one is holding that balance in his hand, there can be no pretense of sympathizing or empathizing with either side. what we do, with our bleeding or flapping hearts, is to vest our own interests and ideas behind a pseudo-philosophical ideological position and watch. watch like we are do the super bowl, the world cup finale, k-1 championship or the formula-1. only, there is blood in this game. we watch like latter day romans ogling gladiators who tear each other apart.
and we turn our heads to avoid the coup de fin, after turning our thumbs down.

* and today, please note that, as we are watching israel trying to beat the crap out of hamas, we are also watching the world divide between two worlds: one that uses and nourishes israel as its spearhead, bound to seek peace for its own security and prosperity, albeit only by the logic of its self-centered and egoistic modern covenant... and that for which violence is a main solution to problems at any level, from the personal and familial to the political and international... a world of societies that can be distinguished by their budgets which allot far more resources for defense and weapons and political abuse than education, health and justice combined. societies that rally de-individualized hordes currently supporting hamas as part of their own jihad.

* a "miracle" occurred last week in iran, the primary supporter of hamas of the gaza philistines, whose dead children we have been mourning vicariously for three weeks: an "adulteress" (?!?) condemned to death by stoning, wriggled herself free of the whole-in-the-ground she was buried in. she was then "pardoned", according to the islamic sharia. two more of her fellow women were hardly as lucky. they died in pain and terror. oh, yes, the violently anti-modern mullahcracy of iran administers a dose of drugs to lessen the convict's suffering during the stoning - for "humane" considerations.

* as for stoning itself, it is obviously the most "public" of executions. unlike the cruel rituals of the needle in the u.s., even the beheadings in saudia, which are done by specialized persons or crews, in "rajm" or stoning, the executioner is the public (4). can you imaginne yourself administering the death of one of your neighbors?

* the hamas understanding of justice and law and politics, decided by a thwarted interpretation of religious dogma that mainly serves to feed existent unshakeable power structures throughout the society, corresponds almost exactly with that in iran.

* true, hamas's sins should not justify the death of children. not even when they are used as shields and propaganda fodder by their fathers!.. but unless that sick, macabre, death-oriented mentality is brought down, to allow life-for-all to flourish -maybe-, the fathers' sins are likely to visit on their children... no matter how many or how profusely our hearts may bleed for them.

* obviously, we are forced to taking sides in an antinomy where all choices are determined by evil. it is no longer a question of "which or what is more (or less) evil"; because that way of looking at phenomena inadvertently introduces some ground to argue by some sick logic the justice of war, which is moot by its nature. the antinomy here is the-all-evil-choice of which evil can lead to more good eventually. whether being so expedient (or rough-hewn reasonable) with matters literally of life and death agrees with our bleeding hearts, i am afraid, will be the determinant of how longer they will go on bleeding.

* so please, be true to your selves. be sincere to your minds and intellect as well as your feelings and compassion; they seldom are contradictory in essence. put all your values, beliefs, wishes, interests, concerns etc. before you. and choose your side. let your hearts bleed but just let your hearts be guided by your intellect, if you really are intent on stopping all the bleeding.

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(1) note the verb of choice please, not "determine" even "define". modernity, as a perfectly dialectical historical event, evolves with its perceived opposites but still is the mainstay of social existence. as every covenant, mathematics has its innate contradictions. the great philosopher - mathematician kurt gödel has excellently undermined its foundations only to re-assess and re-assert its supremacy as a tool for thought and tool of thought. same goes for modernity. its power is less in its absolute truth but its flexibility to devoid its truth of thorns without deviating from its fundamental (mathematical) principles of functioning. whereas in other forms of thinking and organization, such principles, whenever and if they exist outside dogmas, are ever subject to whim and are rather decidious by nature.
(2) living within the covenant does not necesarily mean in obedience or even acquiescence of it, except that every human act is relegated to its content relevant to the covenant.
(3) the accepted term for species that can form effective complex social organizations dependent on certain norms and communicatioon patterns is "eucultural", part greek, part latin. since i have a personal aversion to the inter-lingual bastardization of terms, i have latinized it totally.
(4) there may be some irony in this: rajm is originallly a jewish mode of execution, so is the custom of making adultery a capital crime. needless to say, no jewish society practices it. neither do christians, after jesus said "let who is sinless throw the first stone".

seven points of wisdom (re the palestine situation)

2009-01-07T12:47:00.003+02:00

fact one: israel will not back off from its offensive before george "dubya" bush is out of the white house, bar an almost impossible capitulation from hamas.
fact two: hamas is virtually dead.
true, it is pictured as a victimized hero of the philistines under israeli fire but it already fell far short of hezbollah of lebanon in representing and protecting the interests of its cohorts and backers. unlike hezbollah, hamas only won the elections because the fatah clique was unbearably incompetent and corrupt and simply unbearable. however, little changed for the better in gaza since, except hamas got more despotic.
fact three: a divided palestine can stand no chance at all and it is divided beyond repair as long as hamas has any mandate at all, in or out of gaza. philistines are tarnished with that third world bane that bans them from seeking their interests in confrontation and conflict, rather than competition.
fact four: a true, i.e., effective and workable reunion of philistines is less likely than an accomodation between palestinians (1) and israel. fatahi palestine has nothing to offer the gazai - whereas, once the hamas mentality is suppressed, as it can not be eradicated, plenty of jobs and means of livelihood are likely to be available within israel; a far more effective promise and cure than the dubious yields of incessant intra-philistine politicking and bickering.
fact five: reading all accounts of so called "israeli atrocities against gaza's civilians", in most cases if not in each case, some hunted philistine can be discerned hiding among his family members, under a wife's skirts or a baby's crib - more often than not, using that location as a "trench" to fight against israeli soldiers, therefore practically "inviting" havoc on those beside him. according to hamas ideology, that constitutes "martyrdom". civilians are not ttrained or experienced in guerilla warfare, therefore, they are expendable as propaganda material in order to promote the anti-sionist cause.
fact six: currently, civilian philistine casualties, especially the children, are fodder for the hamas propaganda machine but not for long in all probability. the outlook and rationale of hamas spokesmen toward the rockets they deliberately fire on israeli territories where no military targets exist, is that they have killed "so few civilians", while israeli forces destroy wholesale. in the hamas weltanschauung, human life is valued only by numbers and is problematic only after so many deaths occur.
as passions subside and some logic begins to rear its ugly head in the way people of the world concieve the events in gaza, the utterly vile psychosis revealed in the hamas view is bound to be recognized, turning the psychological and emotional tide, if not toward israel, away from the palestinians, condemning them to further isolation and destituiton.
hamas claims that the last episode of war and violence in gaza was caused not by their indiscriminate rocket fire on israeli civilians but by "israeli occupation". assuming that to be right, the occupation of 1967 was the result of a spectacular israeli victory at the end of a war that lasted only six days, which was started by a united arab front that overwhelmingly outnumbered jewish forces. the "occupation" was the consequence of a response in self defense and gaza itself was "won" from egypt in the six-days-war. the same applies if hamas, true to its absurd philosophy that israel's existence should be terminated, is refering to the 1948 war.
fact seven: this is the last chance for israel to pave the way to some form of permanent peace. not only does its own weal is dependent on it, but also continued disruption between it and any form of islamic political entities will reverberate through the entire eurasian region.
in this war, israel is the "frontiersman", the pioneer, the vanguard in the clash between modern civilization and non-modern or counter-modern political (2) systems; or under pain of over-simplification; between cultures that venerate life and cultures of death and opiates - from opium derivatives to religious fanaticism. since all-out combat, a readiness and willingness to die and kill are weapons true to the latter, it will not suffice for israel to vanquish hamas in combat.
the real enemy is the poverty, the backwardness, the suffering, the wretchedness that has plagued philistines in the last century.
and it has to be israel's ultimate target, endeavor and mission to overcome that scourge of its primary neighbors. the best defense force against hamas is not the rather capable israeli army but palestinians looking forward to a feasible future of welfare, peace and harmony.

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(*) i say palestinians because it is now practically impossible to speak of a "palestinian authority", if it ever existed outside the personal charisma of the late yasir arafat
(***) i use "political" in reference to the helenic polis, signifying any and all aspects of social life therein.

e for an i

2008-12-19T13:45:00.002+02:00

my dear american fellows, or my dear fellows in america.

now that barrack hussein is priming for the top job, he declared setting as priority extricating the troops from ıraq and concentrating on settling afghanistan first.

this requires, more than any military measure, some kind of political solution that inevitably has to be based on some cultural interaction, communication and understanding with the iraqi - even if the so-logical-that-seems-to-be-inevitable-tripartition-of-iraq becomes actual.

unfortunately, my dear fellows are long in the armaments division but two decades after the initial clash and after a half decade of invasion, still seem alarmingly and pathetically short in understanding and accomodating the iraqi mind and culture.

eventual conciliation can come less from (attempted) subjugation than reaching out and establishing a conjunction of interests.

my dear fellows in america, including those in the media industries and holywood, could do something very simple and easy, in respect to getting accross to iraq (which, incidentally, means far and hard to reach) and the iraqi.

they can stop pronouncing iraq as eye-rock, which in some dialects at least, can associate with not-so-nice words, from what i hear.

the local and correct anglicized pronounciation of iraq would be "e-rock". and with far little emphasis on the "e" - closer to something like 'rock than e-mail for instance.

believe me fellows, you do not have to delve or dive, it pays even if you merely try to peek into the culture of a country you are foreign to, much less one whose soil you have occupied.

believe me fellows, i learnt that from watching the hatred garnered by the "ugly american" fat cat tourists of the 60's, who demanded shopkeepers this side of the atlantic "how much is that in real money?"

not hard is it? an i for an e for sympathy? might also even get you some sweet mint tea on the side...

crisis? but whose crisis? not harley davidson's, surely...

2008-10-23T11:08:00.004+03:00

the american economic system is geared to suck even the smallest savings back into its mill through its articulate and complex arrangements of the banking and finance sector. it relies on obtaining cheap money from the populce by way of bankers, which then is invested in supposedly lucrative enterprises.

unlike europe, where a tradition of landlording is historical and historic heritage, there are few opportunitiies for the american moneyed and rich classes to roll in luxury on a rentiér model of what financiers term "pure profit". you cannot buy a flat on park avenue for instance, let it to someone and laze around in malibu squandering the rent away. taxes, costs, overheads, over- burdens etc. will leave you poorer than a pauper.

if you are a beach bum type like me, the only way you can beat the system is invest enough capital in the securities and exchanges market to get you by and to cross your fingers hoping it will not come down crashing with all your debauchery and dreams too - in the 1987 "crisis", which indeed was an earthquake in the american finance system that served to funnel capital toward the cheaper labor markets of asia, an ex-executive on an easy circumnavigation with his wife had to return stateside to get a well paying job for a couple years, so he would not have to sell their yacht (then moored in bodrum) because all their savings had gone gown the drain. well, the quirks and snags of "impure" profit. a french rentiér would be much less shaken.

since americans could not rationally buy houses or other real estate in order to draw an easy income from, realty turned into a field of speculation in the heydays of finacier-ism of the 90's and early 21st century - as opposed to the monetarism of the 80s and early 90s. houses, etc. construction is usually profitable, it launders money well and real estate is truly the rarest good available, so there is always a profit margin that cyclically becomes exaggerated.

thus, buying and selling real estate made money, even with mortgages, i.e., money that is only on paper. the loose finances anchored to america's inbound economy with limited profit margins grabbed the milkier mortgage system like a bonanza, instead of seeking outlets within the universal global market.

real estate and mortgage practically operated on the same level of "money that was not there, virtual money" (1). money that produced some inverted form of pure profit that was denied to the much more honest and controllable endeavor of landlordship.

now that the whole mortgage dream-system is dead, papers report, the demand for skilled labor has already increased - since the last year of bill clinton or thereabouts, unskilled, cheap workers were in demand, signifying the plight of real, unproductive, uncompetitive, un-global american economy.

production economy is back, or waiting to make a come-back, even in america.

since the current "crisis" was a composite result of a failing and unyieldy inbound, introvert "national" economy, talking for the future of production in america should mean a more competitive american presence in the world, as opposed to a more domineering and bullying old fashioned hegemon in military fatigues.

look where harley davidson have come in the last five years or so... from a slumberous style and technology belonging in mid-20th century that caused the legendary machines to be called "hardly-ableson", to once more a world wide magnet for motorcycle freaks (2).

so this is not really a crisis for harley. it is still "crisis? what crisis?" for enterprises and sectors and businesses and what not that can behave as universally as harley did.

and now that the "crisis" blew up the money on paper, we're talking real money. american savings will now most likely go to banks and finance markets that have the world as their playing field. as a very large, indeed, the largest part of that world, american economy will ingest a good deal of such savings made at home and elsewhere, perhaps even in turkey. international, trans-border mergers and a de-nationalization of the most volatile, versatile and fluent element of economics, "capital" will have to dictate a new world order, too, where the nation state, if it wants a say in things will also somehow de-nationalize.

in question is a new world order that dubya and his cohorts could not and will not understand. luckily for america and the entire globe, with mccain on an apparent slide -thanks a lot to sarah palin - the republican anachronism seems to be fading in both its present and promised forms. a couple more weeks and hussein barack obama, it seems, will ascend the world's political throne.

he is lucky... he comes forward at a turn where things, unless clipped by some sick and parochial mentality typified in the dubya regime, have only up as a way to go
(3).

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(1) if what we were taught in macro economics is true, there can be no "money that is noot there" (money used here to signify general resources that may be converted into capital). economy does not tolerate any hiatus and simply fills it in. as it turns out, the states, the bane and brunt of the capitalist system, had the funds and were sleeping on them! however, since they need it to finance wars, armies and a huge bureaucratic apparatus ever ready to cook even further ills, the seeming hiatus may still be filled also by elements even worse than governments, like those headquartered in medellin or the afghan-pakistan border.
(2) present company begs to be excluded... i still favor italian élan and styling and bmw engineering, although my previous "wouldn't be caught dead riding a hardly-ableson" attitude is now of the past... i appreciate and welcome the transformation of harley and hope it is a harbinger of other american industries and services - which will have to turn global in ownership, too.
(3) that's why i supported hillary and would love to see a clinton in the coming democratic administration. once this stage is passed, any flaws in the foundations-in-the-laying of the renovated world-system can only lead to more devastating tremors in its structure. a world-weary, street-savvy u.s. administration would become a blessinng for the world. joe biden is simply not up to standard and hussein is too green behind the ears. i only hope his passing over hillary was not the sum of a petty grudge left over from the campaigns.

crisis? what crisis?

2008-10-11T13:12:00.005+03:00

the world is in a dire financial crisis that, according to some experts at least, threatens to turn economic. well, thanks to that crisis, we, the general public and a not-so-few number of specialists now at last have remembered, if not realized that "financial" and "economic" may be mutually inclusive but not identical.

crisis? big deal! it is a fact established since karl marx that capitalism thrives on crises. immanuel wallerstein, the late andre gunder frank, their crony giovanni arrighi and many others have been harping on how crises alter economic events and structures for no less than 40 years. each crisis, which they summarily define as a (set of) condition(s) that disrupt(s) the balance of capitalist socio-economic structures, forcing them to transform in order to adapt and self-sustain.

the crash of 1929 ended with state-wide economies integrated more or less on national levels, only to serve the inter-nationalization of capitalism as a worldwide system in the post war era. in 1970, the system came of age, as the dollar-gold parity was abandoned. meantime, the accumulated wealth was more generously spread to the consumer classes. the effects of the 1973 oil embargo and subsequent waves of inflation necessitated and hastened an end to keynesian economics. in the 1980s, monetarism operated more or less to unite a world economy about a financial orbit, calling to favor two hitherto secret gods of capitalism, productivity and competitivity. hence, the crisis of the late 80s, with which (if i were an economist, i would claim because of which) the soviet, or rather the state-as-economy system collapsed irrecoverably.
the world economy became more consolidated and associated around capitalist mechanisms than ever.

smaller scale crises continued on a course toward globalization as capitalist production on the trail of profit through productivity and competitivity, discovered the new slave labor throves of the pacific rim and eventually, chindia. the market crashes of 1987 and 1997 ended up with the supremacy and preponderance of a finance-economy that triggered world scale production and consumption.

money was freed! regardless of what nation-state printed it, money became a world citizen. the most fluid element of economics, money, was now globalized as nothing previous.

capitalism, which had ever had to suffer from state apparati since its emergence, was now clearing itself of national bounds, too although that could cause significant suffering for "national" economies. finance determined the fate of the world economy and economies in general.

money made money. and when money made money,it also made money not in evidence. so, everyone got rich. at least, on paper.

when capitalism was more dependent on goods production rather than financing its (re?)productive system, it nevertheless needed to be territorially based, locally established, supported, sometimes protected, even defended against physical outside attacks. the states provided that "service" for a "fee"; i.e., prospering national economies or political élites, depending on how a specific country was run. always, however, a politicallly conducive balance was always struck between the power wielded by the bureaucratic-apparatus and captains of economy.

how public welfare extended to lower classes developing into consumers was also a function of that balance. whereas increased welfare returned almost automatically to the system by way of consumer spending, the state meddling with or in the economy in any form could often become a bothersome, profligate burden; frittering away good resources in a bottomless pit of counter-productive political priorities.

it was this margin of license and power of the state/bureaucracy that enjoyed some influence on political-economy that prompted the structuralist marxists of the 1980s, louis althusser, nikos poulantzas, étienne balibar etc. to propose a "relative autonomy of the state from the ruling (capitalist) classes".

actually, that autonomy was always there. all states in the world are at best, relics from eras where the power vested in them was exclusive to only a few. by definition, if a state exists at all, it has a form of power in reserve that is exclusive only to those who run it. just look what the federal government of dubya's u.s.a. came up with from its deeper recesses to reppress the citizen with, in the name of fighting "terrorism".

neither do nation states belong as powers in global capitalist economy. america is the largest single source of global economical activity, with its huge armory of floating capital, technology, enterpreneurship, knowledge and expertize, etc... its global presence outweighs any rivals. still, in the words of investment analyst and entrepreneur dr. marc faber, "the rebate the federal government issues to beat the crisis can only be kept at home if it is spent on prostitutes and beer, since these are the only products still produced in u.s.".

despite the innegligible accuracy of this economic gallows humor, still, in this age of globalization, even globality, two thirds of american economy is basically national: its processes and methods are introverted, inbound. it is comparatively unproductive and uncompetitive in the markets the world over.

it is true that the said two third almost equals to the total output of the rest of the world and represents extreme power - however, it is powerful only stateside and compared to its true "global" potential, parochial in nature and mentality.

when money started making money, naturally, the largest economy in the world offering the highest profit potential attracted the biggest share of the real and "virtual" profits. naturally, the wealth not only spread around, through consumption and savings, it returned to the money market and boosted its profits.
few other fields of investment in the "real" economy were as inviting, since speculation always pays high dividends if it pays at all, and the finance market was swollen to twice its actual capacity with speculative money that was not there...

real estate emerged as a favorite area of speculation for the virtual economy of the virtual money market. to the small consumer with little money, buying realty with mortgages felt good, both as a means of economic security and because he thought he could finally realize his dreams. real estate was also a quick money maker for the virtual "investor". however, profitable as it may be, real estate is hardly "real" productive enterprise. in the old days, money allotted to realty and land development was dubbed "placement" rather than investment; because it returned little to the economy except some speculative "swollen" money.

then again, a house in malibu or palm beach is hardly a globally competitive item on the market, beyond a certain limit. and however exproportionately its price may be blown, the baloon bursts when the global forces of a world economy summon limited resources to hard core, economic activity on a global scale, where the key to survival is competitiveness.

so this crisis is likely to end up mainly as a potential disaster for two categories of players in the worldwide theater of economy: all non-global, un-competitive, backward, inbound, introverted economies, including the local or transnational finance sectors that vested fortunes in them; and states that count on such economies in order to retain their nationally-defined political interest structures and boundaries may be expected to bear the vrunt and maybe fold - iceland provides a fine example.

this is a crisis that, in order to end without the world bursting somehow in flames, has to establish the few but essential rules of capitalism universally: free flow of resources, rationalization of capital and production activity, no or very limited government regulation coupled with relentless control of compliance with principles, unhampered competition, supported by a universally valid democracy - not only in the home grounds of capitalism but anywhere that is part of the world market. after all, freedom and democracy have costs of their own, which bids unfair competition, should "countries" in chindia not also pay them as most have so far eluded.

a lot depends on how the huge dinosaurs in america will or can respond to the challenge of globalization, as far as global welfare and prosperity are concerned. if all the resources the government allocates for them are spent to restructure the existing system; that is money down the drain. if even half of the colossal home-oriented american economy can turn globally efficient with that infusion, the world cannot help but become collectively richer.

possible? yes but difficult. expect plenty of mergers and acquisitions. plan on the concentration of capital to be invested in production-efficient high technology in goods and services to be marketed worldwide. could you imagine chrysler and gm becoming one firm in the 80s? expect to hear more american brands putting their stamps on universally available products as also euro-american collaboration spirals upward. expect chindia (especially the number one slave labor economy of the cosmos, china) to slow down and watch them get immersed in their "aggravating" internal political problems - then, not so soon but in due time, see how their "citizens" arise as a new middle class of consumers with liberal demands.

also see states losing their "national" billions and sinking their authority in their effort to save "national" savings in the internationally owned, terribly globalized greedy banking sector.

wait for new supra-national forms of organization within which "the nation state" hopes to prolong its current mode of existence. bow to the sarkkozys and merkels and berlusconis of this world -thank god dubya is outbound- and especially gordons, whose incompetence and intransigence simply caused recent crises to deepen.

oh, and oil... watch as russia pretends to bare its teeth and gnarl as its petrol revenues surge and slump beyond its control. check how it has to spend petrodollars for political adventures that turn out to be minor repetitioons of the afghan disaster. wonder why those adventures unfailingly end up dealing the "west" the better hand. laugh as chavez makes more of a clown of himself as the best example of his kind, the nationalist charlatan, getting certainly not himself but his nation poorer.

then say your prayer for the poor, because poverty is not one globally viable commodity and in the global economics, as jesus of nazareth said "shall be taken from he who hath not and be given to he who hath".

put on the 'tramp album and listen to "crsis? what crisis?". there is still fun in life.

not necessarily so sweet somethings

2008-09-10T23:52:00.001+03:00

wait, and time is what is not coming.

sense and you are what is there.

if there is nothing at all,

what are you waiting for?

for, what is there to come to?

a counter-comment on irishness

2008-07-13T10:30:00.003+03:00

just a short counter comment to nilus below:

naturally, we don't know each other. so, let me make my position clear - i am definitely an irish lover!.. especially where the the english (as opposing pole) are concerned. an enigma of history and geograpphy for me is, what in the sake of a full pint of guiness, a thoroughly mediterranean people are doing in a cold northern sea - albeit, in one of its hotter spots... to boot, with (alas!) the english as neighbors? must be a big sin they are atoning for from another cosmos!

anyway, nilus rightly points out to the fact that relinquishing sovereignty needs to be voted for by those who supposedly hold it in their hands.

do i recall any referenda when € 40 billion were channeled into ireland in the last decade - which amounts to an influx of over € 10 thousand per capita, including infants and toddlers as well as our lads and lasses?

i read a very wise observation somewhere once long ago; i think it was ross mcdonald, the detective thrilller writer who said "money is never free... like every commodity, it has to be paid for".

ireland simply refused to pay for the money it got.

you don't call that brutus, you can call it only freeloading. freeloading something that is never free. often, the biller comes back to chip off its dues from what you call your sovereignty.

believe me, i knoow from experience...

irish crap

2008-06-21T13:11:00.003+03:00

the irish are known for their ability to create a problem to every solution. probably, that is why, for years, they kept killing each other over a silly (seemingly) sectarian difference.

now they managed to screw up the by-pass to france's egoistical and egotisitical and ethnocentric rejection of the eu constitution a few years back and clipped the lisbon deal, sealing the unity of the continent...

in other words, they have gone and defacated into the tank where the drinking water accumulates. crapulent with what equals as cause to malt whiskey and warm beer in cases of collective national mass dementia, they took a mephitic crap into europe's surge as the world's sole civilized power, armed with logic and wisdom, instead of various armories to be used either to kill and maim or to threaten.

look who championed ireland's great victory over the union of europe: a businessman that has made a fortune over trade with the u.s., whose competitive advantages might not stand an opening up of the european market.

sound familiar? look at the french farmers, italian fanientes, greek freeloaders, turkish football hooligans, danish and other trade unionists - everyone who thrives, and usuallly thrives for free, as long as the "national" economies are defended by "national boundaries" takes a political crap oon the union. in other words, economies where various sectors of the society suck like leeches on the rest, and productive units that have achieved some global level of competitivity are the defenders of strong(er)national entities against the eu (*). of course, ever leading them, is great britain, her majesty's governments' usual all-time global blooodsucking, imperial opportunism.

now, the political off-shoot, ireland that owes no less to the union than greece for becoming a country to reckon with, stabs it in the back like brutus.

add to that the political parasites who suck on the national state, that long-obsolete instrument of power and usurpation, elevated and propagated as semi-sacred, solely because it is the parochial classes' means of distributing as well as obtaining kudos off the backs of the productive and efficient classes.

is it a coincidence that all hard-line, hard-core nationalists all over the world are also the most dedicated to erect and protect walls around their borders agains the onslaught of globality? for instance, are not the anti-abortion irish catholics among the most militant anti-europeans? or turkey's semi edentulated and de-clawed grey wolves?

notice also the tone of the american journals openly or secretly gloating over the blow the european project was dealt by ireland's rejection of lisbon treaty? especially those publications that promote and watch over american economic interests like hawks?

i always believed that britain and ireland should be kept out of the european union; their "isolationist" island mentality will never ever let them integrate properly with the actually and historically boundariless continent. problem: in practice, they cannot be kicked out and unless the lisbon deal passes through, they cannot really opt out either.

------
(*) the eurocrats, the not-reallly-or-probably-so-necessary-evil in the european machinery is also probably to blame for the aversion it causes, turning into the bigger brother of the continent. ironically though, the rejection(s) of lisbon will empower them more for they are the onnes who eventually will work out a functioning constitution encompassing all.

oil prices down

2008-06-06T16:54:00.004+03:00

i wrote the following post on may 28 and published it in the wrong blog. i noticed my mistake today, after i read that suv owners in america are now hard pressed to sell their dear vehicles...

you see? oil is a commodity, whose fate has to be decided by the economy, as all other commodities. other silly measures -except finding alternative, renewable energy sources-, like war or political intervention, for instance, only help make its prices more un-economical!

here is the post:

***
weeelll... mesdames et monsieurs, i ain't no economist and i sure ain't no finance genius, if any genius at all. i only got eyes to see and a mind to think... i've been busting my chops yelling "oil is a commodity, its price can't keep going only up and up. anytyhing, including war, that causes its price to over-boost is a waste because unless you can drink it, prices go down again when nobody buys it" (*)...

just after america's first major holiday weekend, memorial day, per barrel oil prices fell below $127, furthering a decline borne on a growing sense that record-high costs have cut demand for gasoline and other fuels. ap says americans are driving less because of "bloated prices", while a report informs that compared to last year, vehicle miles on u.s. roads fell by 4.3 percent (11 billion miles). the dollar's gain against the yen and euro also helped reduce oil prices because investments undertaken as a hedge against inflation did not favor oil, although conjonctural opportunities such as a temporary drop in world production could have been tempting.

the best (also the worst) thing about capitalism is that, its virtues and vices tend to balance each other at the expense of those with no power to decide, rather than the virtuous or the vile, who mostly are the same anyway.

so please, think again before you claim that the u.s. is in iraq for any reason but political stupidity, and certainly not for oil. blood in petroleum makes it too expensive to be competitive.

competitiveness? in case you forgot, it is as much a genuine key to capitalism as free enterprise, private property and functioning civil liberties.

-----------
(*) permit me a little gloating please. i am one of the few that have harped on the intellectual hazards of oil fetishism in global political-economy analyses.

democracy without democrats? balooooooney!..

2008-06-06T15:50:00.003+03:00

tayyib efendi, rosy-rosary and co. are in deep, murky waters now, emitting a sewery smell.

they had it coming, they knew they had it coming, at least, they should know it would be coming and therefore they deserve to drown.

look at the old posts by garfucius - the short mental and intellectual capacity, the ethnocentricism and almost autistic assumptions of self righteousness, the revanchist looting of the state bureaucracy and the misuse of the power embedded there, half-bottom faith in democracy, and the obstinate - because repeatedly proven disastrous - conviction that a majority of the popular vote is licence for near-tyrannical arbitrariness.

on the day the turkish court of constitution banned the turban, women's head gear that has become a symbol of religiously tinted or tainted political sympathies, some papers carried the story of two teenagers in love, who were harassed, attacked, mauled by the citizens of sakarya; and arrested, no less, by the police for nothing else than embracing each other in public.

good thing they were not stoned to death!

let's face it. in 2002, tayyib efendi, rosy-rosary and co. won because there was no alternative that offered a promise. in 2007, they came back with a handsome majority mainly because they still had no alternative, except the archaic policitical dementia the republicans and the nationalists spewed forth. so, in one aspect at least, the popularity of the akp is less due to its own preferability than the comparative repulsiveness of the others.

add to that the success stories and elegies sung about tayyib efendi, rosy-rosary and co...

their accomplishments in politics (passing more liberal laws, the eu packages etc.), economics (lower inflation, more world-oriented approaches etc.) or elsewhere (taking steps to reduce bureaucracy, etc.) were invariably guided, if not chart plotted, by the european union, u.s. advisors and the imf. where success is concerned, tayyib efendi, rosy-rosary and co. were only as successful as the airline pilot who flew the aircraft perfectly as long as it was on auto, and headed to a deadly crash as soon as he began flying manually.

as of 2005, tayyib efendi, rosy-rosary and co. did scant few, if anything, to be put down in their favor. especiallly since last year's elections, the bearing turned further downward, while an intolerant, partisan view of all affairs in all walks of society, pervaded every niche of life - as witnessed by the incident of the almost-lynched-teenagers.

so much for a democracy championed by non-democrats. and so much for a democracy without democrats.

regarding the future of turkey, it is not an issue of whether the constitutional court's decision is legal, fair and right or whether the turban decision is the harbinger of akp's eventual closure. the problem is that the court has had to try a political party, is likely to come up with a ruling closing it down that just might not feel right; and that the party in the judges' sights is not really innocent either, at least for an equal population to that which has invested its faith in it.

the problem is that, nothing seems right and everything seems wrong.

and for the same reason: still, as in 2002, there is not an inkling of a political resistance to tayyib efendi, rosy-rosary and co., to lead them in a direction where at least some semblance of right can be extracted for the two divided masses currently hiding behind their particular wrongs.

effective resistance to the political authority is exclusively limited to the military and the judiciary whose exclusive domain of power, it should be doubted, may be growing smaller.

the people of turkey voted the 1982 constitution in by 92 percent, and have been wearing it like a noose around their necks since.

the question is, offered the same draft, how many today would not vote for it again? a few generations after 1982, turkey's democracy is hostage to a political system that can only survive as long as it raises as few democrats as possible.

big, blasphemous words with philosopher's testimony

2008-06-05T18:48:00.002+03:00

philogeny and ontogeny cross evolutionary paths at the point of ennui – it is boredom with all status quo that gives rise to all bon-cultural ventures and exciting mutations. as friedrich nietzche said: "only the most acute and active animals are capable of boredom. a theme for a great poet would be god’s boredom on the seventh day of creation."

blasphemic breezes

2008-06-05T18:45:00.001+03:00

enigma is the best inspiration to souls in search of a faith. because they believe themselves to have found, most faithful are boring.

more blasphemy

2008-06-05T18:42:00.000+03:00

the greatest prophet on earth can give men no more than a watchword. and the comedy is that, the vaguer the watchword, the greater is the prophet!

garfucius's blasphemous ideas

2008-06-05T18:40:00.000+03:00

the homily “one picture is worth a thousand words”, denotes, at best, a gross inability to abstract from the eidetic.

exiles at home

2008-05-26T15:38:00.003+03:00

how many times did you wake up to find someone beside you, whom you wanted to awaken, too?

it is easy to live solitude, hard to know it. and when silence becomes a shout, it is because it could not whisper to you, or because you could not hear it when it did!

i and my generation are the losers in a war we were never old enough to fight. most of our lives was spent in preparation for it; yet, just when we were about ready, we had to explain to ourselves, why we ought to fight it, why war should be the way to the ends we were taught were universally ours.

we either religiously took to the old teachings; or as religiously rejected them and more religiously sought new ones. the most confused amongst us, we made disbelief our cause. we diebelieved so piously, we evaporated existentially; so that it may not be fair to speak of us with the pronoun we or they.

we lost.

ours was a generation audacious enough to question all values taken for granted - and sometimes, even to re-define them, which needed far more courage. we turned love into an experience instead of an utopia or lust. "democracy" finds a meaning now, because young women were burning their bras in the late 60s. freedom became a palpable word because it was a title in jimi hendrix's first posthumous album. even when our motives were not always honest and pure, we honestly chased the truth. we wanted to know. we re-wrote the rules of knowledge.

why, then, though we seemed to be so right, did we lose? maybe, because we questioned, also, the meaning(s) and the value of winning? how many success stories between 50 and 60 today are really proud of whom they have turned out to be, in comparison to whom they hoped to become? how many of this generation recognize anything in today's world, of the world they once thought possible?

we lost, not because we went wrong, took the wrong turn, twist, road, fall, whatever into the world we denied. we lost because at that point, our loss felt certain. it was the only certainty that hit us and facing certainty, we stopped doubting denying. we stopped asking questions and the wind dropped out of our kites. one by one, we started to accept; so that gradually, each of us caved in (*).

that makes us the only generation in modern history, left with nothing to truly believe in. that is why too many fanatics, in every walk from politics, to business, to religion emerged from "our" ranks: because action is the fool's way of convincing himself what he is doing is right!

exiles at home! wherever we are, we are home... but home is nowhere!

if one believes in fighting, one need not believe in what he fights for. we fought without that belief. we were probably the only generation that saw the futility in fighting for fighting's sake.

we believed in peace... but without the ability to find a novel way to learn and teach it. in our ignorance, we made the fatal mistake. we took to the ways we had already diagnosed as wrong at the beginning: fighting and preaching, thus shoving truths down ours and everyone's throats.

the victors always take something of the vanquished. i do not know who the victors were in our case. our war was, at least we believed, for everyone. so, when we lost, our opponents did, too. i think, instead of taking something from us, whomever vanquished us left something with us: their fight, against which we had waged our war.

--------
(*) i still remember the day i first heard pink floyd's dark side of the moon (1973), their greatest chart success and the feeling of betrayal that pervaded all my senses. every note and nuance was full of answers instead of questions. it was as if one moon i sailed by had really turned all and forever dark.

reading a global coffee cup

2008-05-13T12:40:00.003+03:00

i keep writing (and preaching in classes) that in modern capitalism, oil is but another commodity; but an input in the production process. production without consumption is not only no profit, it is simply loss, so prices of products/commodities have to be regulated by the market, not on a government table.

oil wars are (and can be) waged only and only if the cost of war, blended with the cost of oil that is procured by means of that war is not prohibitive for the functioning of the cycle of production-consumption -profit-reproduction. in proper capitalism, the only indispensability is profit that preferably occurs in the far more controllable and predictable ambiance of freedoms and competition. therefore, no component of the whole production-consumption-profit-reproduction cycle, financing, raw materials etc., even oil can be allowed to take hostage the whole process. according to many authors, though, oil, especially when used as a political leverage by otherwise politically ineffectual world players, tends to upset economic balances.

hence:

a) oil needs to be replaced by other forms of energy. major oil companies and energy giants are already investing billions of dollars on alternative sources that are replenishable and also environmentally sound. a breakthrough is imminent (*).

b) the bulk of oil revenues from petroleum exporting countries are either politically squandered (mostly, if the government is anti-western and anti-u.s.) or invested in western businesses by oil sheikhs etc. this means that a drop in the popular consumption of oil is far more of an economical risk for producers than its prices falling. you cannot fetch a price for something that is virtually worthless.

c) by the same token, too expensive oil also means too expensive everything. it means people will simply consume less of everything and the whole global economic scheme will simply shrink, along with profits. in that case, those with only oil to sell, will suffer far more losses than the rest as they will have more need and less money for things that make their world go round.

c) in the shorter run (j. maynard keynes said "in the long run, we're all dead", anyway), panic boosts in per barrel prices of oil, are not impossible. many industries and economies are going to be affected and perhaps sink as a result. however, just like in practice, the recent mortgage crisis mainly helped weed out the uncompetitive, unyieldy volume of credits in the global (especially american) market, possible per-barrel-crises too, will eventually strengthen the structure of capitalist world economy; and subjugate the technologically less advanced and backward raw-material-vendors. countries and societies that tend to act like badly managed business enterprises and those who fail to manage the transition to competitiveness, will end up poorer or bankrupt. if they are oil exporters only, they will have even less of a control over their global fate.

d) those fallen powers will produce the rogue states of tomorrow.

this is a short read from the globe's coffee cup. for now though, stains do not waft the sweet smell of fresh coffee but the rank odor of crude.

----------

(*) i find no reason to succumb to the conspiracy theory that feasible alternatives are already developed but kept secret because economies are too geared to fossil fuel consumption. the world's primary energy is electric and it can be produced from many alternative sources without disrupting the petrol based industries though cutting oil prices down to logical levels.

china miracle and capitalism's levels of survival

2008-05-13T12:11:00.003+03:00

i never got to write much here about china, except hint occasionally that i do not succumb to the view that we are witnessing a chinese miracle. as a matter of fact, the official slave industry that is china, has already begun suffering from monkey wrenches breaking its basically foreign installed and managed economic machinery: labor intense production is not efficient and costs are rising as bankruptcies mount. manifacture is escaping town, to even more backward alleys as vietnam, maybe now after the deluge, to myanmar which the brits still call bhurma! (*)

that is capitalism for you... dickensian labor exploitiation of the 19th century turned slant-eye in the 21st... only to the limit it cannot be permitted any more to disrupt the overall (global, if you like) balance of the entire market by sapping free enterprise and competition. yes, capitalism thrives also on all the freedoms that make it function, all of which china lacks.

it is those freedoms that regulate the end-profit margins in the market. no jobless european or american is interested in buying cheap asian goods, not because of any philosophical or national or racil cause but simply because economics dictates that a jobless man cannot afford to buy too many things. therefore, like water in different elevations, capitalism seeks its own levels of survival.

------
(*) hurray for the brits! i hate this postmodernist pseudo-anticolonialist, quasi- postcolonialist maneouver of changing country names to pretend "identity" and independence. all ex-colonies today are even more dependent on former conquerors, plus, almost all have also to kowtow to the u.s. on top of former sahibs. change of name is too facile for a change of fate, as minds and technics of ex-colonies are still dominated by rules of slavery. ditto, i also hate the campaign to change turkey's official international name to türkiye, for the reason that it reflects a colony mentality. it is also rude and impolite: the excuse for the proposed switch is that turkey is the english name of a bird and therefore, insulting to turks. the same bird, is called hindi in turkish, which means "indian"! yet, i fail to come accross any campaign in turkey to change its name to anything from hindi, which indians may equally percieve as debasing. typical to the colony mentality, neither such eymological knowledge, nor such sensitivity is expressed by the extremely touchy türkiye campaigners.

about comments

2008-05-13T11:43:00.002+03:00

i mostly publish any "sensible" comments that arrive to the blog. since deciding what is sensible inevitably involves some sort of censorship, i try to be as "tolerant" as possible. however, many of the recent ones i rejected were either pure gibberish, promising salvation when marduk hits the world, or had more expletives in them than explanation, or were simply "commercially" motivated.

i hesitated over whether i should publish or reject the comment from modern sanat ortamı declaring hillary as a horny mad dog and obama as a puppet with a cat's paw. i let it run...

i let it run because the comment reflects the parochial, introverted, potentially xenophobic and negationist philosophy typical of a) ex-leftists in underdeveloped societies; b) ex-misfits who now misfit their role as misfits.

there is a world out there that we once wanted to change and if at all, we could only do so fractionally. maybe we were wrong, maybe the people in the world we wanted to change who did not want the change were right.

whatever, people did not want change. people do not want change now either.

it simply means that whomever set off to change (at least some part of) the world have failed to offer a realistic possibility that a) they could or can; and b) the resultant world would or will be better.

therefore, cursing hillary or hussein will not make a difference.

***

metin commented that both democrat and republican candidates were from the legislative, with little executive accomplishment to their names. he is right...

he is right and that is why i supported hillary, because unofficially, she has been part of the executive in both arkansas and the white house as first lady. you do not even have to be (or have been) married to understand how a clever and ambitious woman can grasp and influence her man's occupation. and hillary is both clever and ambitious enough to garner some know how from bill's terms in office, which hussein lacks.

it may still be a close call but unless america is going mad, this will be a democrats' election - although senator mccain is certainly an improvement over dubya (no big deal, almost anybody would be).

we have an airborne spaceship that has run amok called the world, all we need is a minimally talented captain to land her back down on a tolerable course. i, personally at least, have no miraces left to expect.

there is a time to give up

2008-05-07T19:19:00.003+03:00

there is a time to give up... not to quit but to realize and admit enough is enough. it is now time for hillary to concede that she has lost the primaries to barack hussein and negotiate the possibilities of hitting the ballot box together, this time, she as candidate vice president.

the race went on as i expected, with almost every state that is linked to the world booting for hillary, while those americans who think detroit is still the center of the universe, supported hussein. it still remains a fact that, despite all his charm and persuasive campaigning at home, generally speaking, hussein is no less ignorant than dubya in conceptualizing, diagnozing and visualizing solutions to global affairs.

if it were at all possible to revert america to the yesteryears of isolationism, barrack hussein obama might have become a really good president. in today's world, obama is only as competitive as gaz guzzling chevrolet of the 50s, weighing three tons!

that is why hillary has to back down before all bridges between the rivals are cast off. from this point on, she has a responsibility to the entire world in cleaning as best the mess the u.s. has created under dubya, as it is a huge gamble to bet on hussein's capacity to manage such a gargantuan task. since hillary cannot become president, she has to play second fiddle to a president who may win the hearts of grass roots americans to all his liking while has few tricks to stimulate the minds of a weary world awaiting and hoping for at least what bill clinton once had to offer. the world is hardly concerned with what he did in the oral office, it has been suffering from clumsier versions thanks to bush's political performance in the last eight years.

more pippas will come to be slain

2008-04-15T14:39:00.003+03:00

pippa bacca, the peace artist or the "peace bride" as the turkish press dubbed her because she traveled in a wedding dress to promote peace, was killed as the resultant of the same introverted, anti-introspective, paranoid schizoid mentality that plagues droves of turkish fans after almost every international football meet.

i am not underscoring the drama but the poor woman was slaughtered for the same reason many persons, including children, were end-targets of desultory bullets from illegal guns fired indiscriminately by reveling supporters of victorious teams; or, she is the victim of the same dementia that caused two british hooligans to be stabbed and slugged to death by hoodlums that worshipped galatasaray.

poor bride pippa was murdered by a totally witless, idiot crazed with lust who believed in the heart of his hearts that because pippa was a foreigner and an infidel, and therefore by nature light and promiscuous, she was fair game to a turk, whose masculine prowess and virility is universally beyond question. all those tales and myths of military and manly conquests entitled him automatically to any and especially a non-believer woman because he is muslim-turk and has a birthright to gratify his wishes on anything that is the bounty of historic superiority that genetic heritage endows him with.

any corner of any turkish city is replete with similar would-be-monsters awaiting their chance with some pippa. and since turkish women, too, are getting looser and looser as ways change, that pippa may well be named ayşe.

poor pippa the artist was thus also the victim of a cultural abominality. then, she was the combined victim of the turkish police, judicial and penal system that simply fails or refrains to punish any infraction against whatever social value that holds the society together, except perhaps fear. this indifference extends from traffic violations to incense or rape; even murder; turnsing to ferocious duty bound acuity only if political authority is threatened, say by a march of the teachers...

the tacit "official" (*) reaction to pippa's atrocious slaying emphasized its inconvenience, the blemish it caused to turkey's image in europe...

the beast that killed pippa alos knew, at least unconsciously that the punishment meted out to him would not be measure for the wrong he did. he was aware, or at least believed, at worst, he may spend a few years in prison - that, most probably, will only boost his street image and prestige.

this is not the end poor dear pippa; very sorry for you and those that will follow!.. for, there will be more victims like you, as long as this country's population is getting more and more unevenly divided across a schism of civility, losing their ability to exist together.

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(*) official here does not necessarily refer to government or other formal personnel but to all who deems in his person an authority to speak in the name of others, sometimes the entire society.

tolerance? what tolerance?

2008-04-11T14:41:00.002+03:00

one more note about izmir's loss of the expo, or rather, a reference to the general mentality that underlies turks' promotion of their image in the world:

although turkey is and presents itself as a muslim country (1), it also is usually keen on not being associated with hardline muslim countries that are presumed to be disliked in the west, as iran or saudia. the preferred image is one of modernized, moderate, cooperative and compatible islam. tolerance is an "item" often used to prove compatibility with western life habits, in the propaganda messages. tolerance, in historic practice, translates as believers from different religions living in the same geography politically dominated by members and the ideology of a single faith. the turkish thesis is that "muslim" turkey has been the home of christians and jews as well, through the ages. the izmir texts presented to the bie assembly in paris also carried a high dose of alleged religious tolerance.

analysis:

first of all, "tolerance", especially in that particular context, reeks badly of religiousity, shadowing the modern - secular and laique signals in the message. in any case, it implies severity, a division, a rent that cannot be spanned in essence. therefore, it negates its own meaning and claim that harmony exists or insinuates the high probability that the harmony that may momentarily prevail is not permanent.

secondly, there seems to be little need in today's modern world to emphasize such tolerance. all civilized (western) countries protect all their citizens and guests from other countries by universally applied laws and many include special provisions against discrimination and persecution (2). each and every individual is free to practice any faith and also, to propagate it. yet, just to state a dire example from tolerant turkey, about a year ago, three protestant missionaries were brutally murdered and a catholic priest stabbed to death.

or a comic example: in istanbul, the city's official bordello is next door neighbors with an ancient greek orthodox church in tophane. had there been a greek brothel next to an abandoned mosque in salonika or belgrade, the ruckus raised here would be heard in hades.

third, the propaganda based on tolerance can hardly stand factual historical testing: the religious coexistence that turks seemingly confuse with tolerance was a social necessity. ethnic turks were not masters in most trades that were the métiers of the christians. also, excluding trades out of reach of muslims and channeling them to a military occupation allowed the state/palace to maintain its absolute political hegemony over the population. non-muslims could get rich but they could not gain political potency.

furthermore, keeping the orthodox archbishop under the sultan's thumb was calculated to afford good influence over conquered peoples of the balkans. still, that they were allowed to practice their religion was subject ever to political compliance. as a matter of fact, the greek orthodox archbishop was hanged at the gate of the patriarchate when he was deemed supportive of the revolution in the morea, for instance.

tolerance in everyday life is also a latter day myth: for most of the time, settlements and quarters of cities were separated among muslim, christian and jewish subjects. often, different christian sects, too, like the armenians or the assyrians, cıatholics and protestants lived more or less physically apart.

until the tanzimat reforms of 1839, churches were permitted only to ring bells carved of wood. perhaps banning brass church bells was one reason an armaments industry based on founding skills never developed properly in turkey (3)

no non-muslim ever rose to high bureaucratic office in the turkish republic. especially, no non-muslim ever was allowed to become a soldier, a diplomat, a general manager etc... indeed, pitifully few of the very few turkish citizens who are not muslim are even employed by the government. the last armenian member of parliament was elected in the 1950s and ever since, only one jew entered the assembly as a deputy.

yet tolerance was still prominently used as a propaganda item in izmir's promotion campaign for the expo. tolerance is hardly an asset or a matter for pride. it is an obligation of civility that should not be used for propaganda (actually, cannot be used either, because it means nothing to a civilized mind).

then again, the word tolerance itself is repugnant. it is synonymous "enduring" or "bearing" someone or something that in its nature is "not as good as i happen to be".

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(*) turkey used to project itself as a country "with a predominantly muslim population". in the recent past, i.e., since the akp dominated the political scene, it began to be emphasized more as a muslim country.
(2) like the u.s. hate crime laws.
(3) some huge founderie did exist and cannon and balls could be molded. however, they were too purpose specific to create the metallurgical industries.

rpp is worse than a rotting political carcass

2008-04-10T14:21:00.002+03:00

just a short note for anybody anywhere who had hopes about the repuıblican peoples party of ever serving some use in turkey's future:

the supposedly left wing party that did absolutely nothing to liberate any sector of the society, including labor, from the restraints of the military constitution of the 1982 coup d'etat, now reached the point where it prides itself on stopping the debates on the article 301 of the penal code that is universally recognized as a stumbling block before freedom of expression in the country.

rpp' s acting speaker güldal mumcu, who is the widow of the famed left wing journalist - author uğur mumcu, assassinated in 1993, refused to send the akp's motion for amendments to 301 to the parliamentary committee to review it.

by rule, the speaker or acting speaker has no right to deny the trtansfer of any motion to related committees.

the party's whip, kemal anadol publicly voiced official approval of güldal mumcu' s action.

thus, the rpp blocked a move toward more freedom and liberties just and only because it was brought forth by the akp.

tangentziale

2008-04-08T13:59:00.005+03:00

it has been more than a week since izmir lost to milano in a contest over where the expo 2015 mega trade fair will be hosted.

like a football meet, the loss was accepted, logged and forgotten. not one line appeared, not one word was uttered; -as if something shameful had happened-, about why it was milano that won and how come izmir was beaten... except, of course, the regular confusion of technics and tactics with long term, meaningful strategy and policy: we missed the chance because the foreign ministry did not work well, propaganda was aimed at the wrong agents, african delegates that constituted the majority were neglected and so on...

let's do a necropsy on the dead horse we got at our doorstep, then:

first and foremost, milano is a real city; izmir is an inflated third-and-a-half-world settlement, splattered by hazard on a fine geography like fresh cow manure. she is an overgrown village dressed like a town. she is confusing and confused, unplanned, abused, unwieldy and ugly. she is the perfect concrete canyon, ripped off from the sea, arteries congested, life spaces choked, condemned to the car, dirty, unkempt and exhausting. izmir is a place that holds, without even putting it on, an urban garb agaisnt her deformed peasant's body. a front without depth.

the aerial propaganda photos of izmir for the expo showed hectares of buildings heaped upon each other. no greenery, no parks, no recreational breathing spaces, no tribute at all to nature - with the sole exception of graveyards and the "culture park" that houses the annual izmir fair since the 1930s. slab after slab after slab of ugly concrete marks the landscape otherwise.

izmir's cultural contribution to turkey - leave alone the globalizing world - is scant. alarmingly few poets, lettrists, artists have originated from izmir in the latter days at least - and that, through istanbul. the country's third largest settlement of no less than three million is hardly even mentioned in the news unless because of some atrocious crime or accident, or events that are projections of ankara or istanbul.

izmir is a seven millenia old city. except for its badly spoilated citadel and few-and-far-between small stone houses of yesteryear, one would think it was built yesterday.

on the day the balloting was to be held in paris, the republic square in the rather posh part of town, was filled to the brim with people, merry making, listening to the pop stars and other showpersons that were "sending izmir's message to the delegates". that was not all, a lot of "ambassadors", from the president himself to brazilian football stars playing in turkish teams were involved in the parade to make izmir the location of choice. some delegates in paris, too, had to undergo or endure -what, to me, is an ordeal- plenty of folk dancing as well as a staging of "anatolian fire", a so called modern dance recital that somehow turks came to love - although, considering the nation's affinity with suıch occupations as the ballet, little comment seems to be necessary. oh, and not to forget, some two thousand or so paid persons officially joined the campaign to lure the expo to izmir.

staging multi million dollar shows, although more for home consumption that persuasive propaganda apparently did not wash over being a real city with permanent physical and cultural attractions that appeal to real people. but it certainly was easier.

the expo failure is now forgotten for good. nobody of any might or effect will ever probe into it again. and should a similar opportunity, say the olympics, should befall the way of any turkish city (?), the powers that be will only try to bring in more singers, louder drummers, more colored folk dancers and maybe, a few african footballers this time - just in case.

third-and-a-half-world means always running tangent to rationality.

oops, by the way, the highway that circles milano, with its astral geographical layout, its constellated combination of the arondissement and grid city plan, the road that gets you near anywhere in the urban area is called the "tangentziale". some things are never same, are they?

are cheneys of this world ever welcome?

2008-03-12T12:39:00.003+02:00

the choice of dick cheney once again as vice president to yet another bush administration, was proof enough of dubya's intention to devour the world's resources relentlessly for unilateral benefits; and follow policies favoring nothing except increasing the economic wealth of selected american businesses -remember halliburton?-, with little regard for values that we assume that make man a respect-worthy creature.

dubya and cheney are representatives par excellence of the ugly american of the 50's and 60's; that greedy, avaricious, nefarious, grabbing, irreverent model of imperialism. they have blood on their hands from the financial profits that were reaped from the many wars they have championed, from viet nam to iraq, twice.

now, dick cheney, is going to step down u.s. air force 2, with his blood stained boots, on turkish soil. he is going to ask ankara to support his career-long-wet-dream, (any) military action against iran- from which, he must hope, companies like halliburton or bechtel that he symbolizes as a most hated specimen of a businessman-politician from the most hated ally, can reap extra kudos, as they do in iraq.

cheney will ask turkey for some blood acre, probably, because washington maintained a relative condoning silence while turkish forces operated in northern iraq.

these are men who, because they can manage a large company (*), think they can rule the world. they could, too... on the morning of the coup d'etat on september 12, 1980, the one that turned so bloody that nearly 70 persons were hanged in addition to hundreds shot, tortured and otherwise harassed, one official that later became a big shot in the dubya regime phoned washington and relayed the good news: "our boys did it..."

dick cheney & associates inc., have licked turkish blood off their fingers, too.

wonder if they realize that truly global companies, not imperialistic relics are more and more swarming the upper levels of fortune 100 lists.

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(*) "manage" may be an euphemism... many of halliburton's deals have received criticism, if only for immensely lacking transparency.

the world needs both hillary and hussein

2008-03-12T11:51:00.003+02:00

one good sign about america's upcoming polls is that the republican plague will probably end. even the most die hard urban middle class voters seem to have had enough, after eight years of dubya.

however, this makes the democratic caucuses still more crucial, for a definitive win by barrack hussein obama may mean that the same mental disease that globalized the bush havoc, namely an ignorance of world affairs is going to persevere. in seven years of the dubya regime, america paid scant heed to the outer world. not just reaping but raping the opportunities of overseas profit was the sole goal of u.s. world politics. a win by obama may continue the situation not at all because that is hussein's policy -actualy, hillary may be more prone to that- but because those universal rapists are far savvier than the guy from hawaii. i never take campaign speeches seriously but nevertheless, obama's stance seems to over-favor (so called) isolationist policies for my taste.

americans should keep in mind, just because dubya is already a sitting duck does not mean that the colossal wave of anti-american sentiment he amassed in seven years is going to flatten away, before hitting some sad shore.

why hillary then? obviously, she is a seasoned first lady, rather than a good world class politician. yet, she is probably more sympathetic toward the universal public. she probably is more popular among europeans and africans than for many folks in the midlands and meadowlands of rural america. she is not only cognitively disposed to but also has a political crop to harvest from the development of an efficient and effective global capitalist network, i.e., one that also benefits, even on a wee small scale, the society it invests in (exploits, if you are marxist oriented) as well as the financial center it originates from. that is why she has carried all the globally active states and almost none of the rural-local ones. that is why the texas draw is tilting toward hussein already. ohio, her last win, for instance, thrives on high tech exports!

hillary's supporting corps are also experienced, knowledgeable experts who are aware that war is costly and there are cheaper and mutually beneficial alleys leading to solutions in peaceful methods. after all, capitalism is about profit rather than conquest.

whom would you have paying an official visit to your country in the name of america's president in today's world? dick cheney, condi rice or madeline allbright?

and imagine that instead of that blood stained ambulatory $ sign, dick cheney, it is the cute, sympathetic, ernest new generation, outgoing next president of the u.s., barrack hussein, who climbs down the stairs of u.s. air force 2...

obama is a man who only stands to gain from playing second fiddle for one or two terms to hillary; while learning to become an even better president, not from her but her husband, who happens to be brightest light in recent american political history, possibly, even brighter than jack kennedy.

that is why the world needs both hillary and hussein.

oscar and obama and john wayne

2008-02-25T13:59:00.003+02:00

the funny little golden statuettes of that fellow, some long gone starlet's "uncle oscar", were passed around last night.

"... and the oscar (in more cases than we're accustomed to) goes to: britons, french and spaniards!.."

there is no surprise here. it is the end-result of that process called globality. america is, after all, the capital city of the world. whether they realize or not, or worse, whether they like it or not, that "vast piece of land between manhattan and california" also is a suburb of that global urb.

no, they mostly like it not - that is why they root for husein obama, who, they probably hope, will restore them to the good old insular years of ingrown power and prosperity, signified by ten ton, gas guzzling v-8 automobiles from detroit and john wayne movies from hollywood.

sorry, detroit is near dead and hollywood is california's windows on the world.

unfortunately therefore, though the guy is reallly nice, charming and even quaint, choosing obama for president, is the same as yelling:

"... and the oscar goes to: joooohn waaayne!.."

reservations!

2008-02-22T15:47:00.002+02:00

turkey's invasion of northern iraq has begun four days ago whether this is a mere incursion, or a lasting mission in cohorts with u.s. policies to partly relieve and aid the american forces in the territory still remains to be seen.

what is certain however, is that, america would never sanction the turkish operation for free - it also remains what the bill is going to be: certainly some support against iran and/or a more active and combative involvement designed for turkish troops in iraq; not to mention afghanistan. and also, whatever economic quid pro quo dick cheney may put on the table in his coming visit that will certainly bring more kudos to some american conglomerate(s).

my first reservation: any military move by dubya's lame duck administration against iran will only serve to consolidate the badly shaken political ground under the feet of ahmadinajad, and his extremist clique, nip off the budding urban opposition to the mollah-cracy.

the rest concern turkey mainly:

above all, the pkk is not a terrorist organization; it is an ordinary gang of ordinary crime that happens to operate accross borders, along a geographic stretch that has been one of the world's primary routes of contraband trade for at least four millennia. calling the pkk terrorist affords it a potential and implied legitimacy as an organization with licit political claims. turkey's diplomatic pressure, aided by the gang's atrocities have resulted in its classification as a terrorist organization by the e.u. and the u.s.a. but in the unofficial media, it is often mentioned as a rebel or "guerilla" movement, not a long step from demanding some legal status on international scale (*).

next, over-concentration on northern iraq as the pkk's military base, seems to shadow the fact that the the kurdish population in turkey is the human resource of the gang. the possibility that the operation may root out the "militants" accross the border raises my level of anxiety that the band will be driven underground in turkey, staging attacks on urban civilian targets - 63 such attempts were reportedly foiled last year, while two bombs did explode with signifiant fatalities in ankara and diyarbakır.

furthermore, since by national identity, the pkk is a turkish organization, the casualties on both side of the war are turkish citizens. this, "read backwards", spells civil war. crushing the pkk or other criminal bands is turkey's prerogative and duty, as well as its very legitimate and legal right naturally. however, decimating what amounts to an ethnically distinguishable portion of its own population, albeit legally, requires from a state that takes such measures, an unnatural effort in order to win back the hearts and minds of not only the remainder of the insurgent minority, but all the rest of its demographic denominations. there is not the slightest indication that the mental and especially inntellectual make up of turkey's current political élite is capable of that. on the other hand, the general public presentation of the war against the pkk is replete with messages that can potentiallly alienate the entire kurdish "minority", instead of welding their non-irredentist majority back to the state's claim of legitimacy and its rôle as the pillar of that collective legitimacy.
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(*) not neccessarily being given it, of course...

lost

2008-02-20T17:09:00.004+02:00

it seems my favorite candidate for american/world presidency is losing bad to that new kid from illinois, who might just become the first black tenant of the white house.

no need to be a bad loser and there's little anyone can do but the american voters - however, one malady that made dubya a terrible politician, an ignorance and consequent disregard of the whole world in the face of the great american parish, might well be plaguing hussein, too. of course, it is not fair to compare obama to the (thankfully) sitting duck any other wise, but parochialism and a careless ethnocentrism seems to be common shortcomings.

i do not believe that the world or america itself can brook another term, much less another eight years burying its head in utah salt deserts or midwest corn fields.

let's hope at least that hillary and obama will run together in any case and win the elections.

senator mccain, the "new reagan", might just prove to be that...

kosovo, "pope" rowan, islam, tolerance and coexistence

2008-02-18T13:41:00.005+02:00

cut me a little slack for resorting to postmodernist terminology but kosovo's (rather belated) independence should be "read" (1) not as a discreet political happening but in complementary contrast with two other recent incidents that give clues to the new formations within the modern universe: archbishop rowan williams's call to explore the possibilities of plural jurisdiction in british society and the resurgence of islamist hooliganism in denmark over the rehashed cartoon crisis.

although it is a step in an obviously opposite direction, kosovo independence could as well be pointing out to another step in the gradual bankruptcy of the exclusive centrality and power afforded to the nation state in preserving and sustaining social cohesion. kosovo is, after all, another mini (2) state of peasantly origin. its integrity with serbia is less a significant material loss to beograd than its loss of delusions of imperial grandeur, highly inflated by using russian gas.

kosovo's independence is, effectively, less the establishment of a new "centrality" that states signify than the disintegration of serbia's yugoslavian inheritance. kosovo cannot hope to stand on its own without the physical and moral support of global social forces that endorse a loosening of centralized political power into local autonomies and more freedoms for the individual - a modern revival of the greek polis, united within a worldwide network of communication would be the ideal global political system to replace the westfalia born organization of nation states.

dr. rowan' s rather far-fetched call for the recognition of islamic "requirements" in the workings of the british-cum-western juridicial/social system is another indicator that the political cohesion personified in the nation-state system has begun to fail in fulfilling its historical functions of a forced and pretended "national" homogeny within a given geography.

capitalism, the social and economic motivator of modernity, has evolved to a stage where functions of productivity (3) have become definable more in reference to merit, capability and efficiency, rather than the imperatives of belonging to any politically identified geography. even within the same city block, it matters less whether your neighbor is a sikh, a muslim, a protestant, a turk, a tutu or a finn etc., than how well (s)he can drive a truck, design a building, cook hamburgers or street brawl. more and more, groups that are formed of individuals who feel threatened by those "new" references:
i) hide into such false categories called "identity", in search of various ex-machina centralities that supposedly privilege them against those assumed to be more advantageous in terms of merit, capability and efficiency;
ii) cling to previously established such imaginary "identities", nation, class, parish etc., in an effort to safeguard vested interests, real or assumed - the french farmers, german neo-nazis, trade unions that eventually drive industries out to the third world from europe are among examples.

the archbishop of canterbury's suggestion that some sort of legally propped up pluralism based on religious variagation might merit consideration, comes as another sign that previous criteria of collective cohesion, highly regarded for the maintenance of the nation state system, such as the universality of the "law of the land" are slowly sliding into non-functionality, if not downtright dis-functionality (4). archbishop dr. rowan is in practice, the pope of (the church of) england. by historic definition, he is the headman of the queen's religion. in other words, he is the chief priest of a state religion.

however, the archbishop's call sounds far fetched because the "sharia" law he claims the muslims of britain desire and covet, represents just the opposite of what kosovo's independence signifies: just as kosovo's emergence as a state is a step away from the system of states supposedly begun in westfalia, dr. rowan's kind of "religious" multiculturalism instates a new centrality inherently incompatible with the globality of capitalist modernity. it institutes not the individualized plurality of merit, capability and efficiency but the constricting, collectiv-izing centrality of sharia that purports to bind 1.5 billion people as a quasi-nation dispersed everywhere in the modern world. it underwrites islam's essential claim to ecumenic, monolithic legitimacy by reducing myriad cultural differences of 1.5 billion people to an all-subsuming religion; thus subjecting it gto ultimate political abuse, too.

in a world where geography has become more relevant in reference to a variety of experiences of social/global temoporality, rather than mere cartographic coordinates, such miscegenation of (multi)culturally defined temporal geographies is possible only if tolerance is mutual, so that co-existence is organically possible. any unilaterally extended liberty to a minority, purporting to be an "identity", such as muslims in the west contend, has to be reciprocated in full with a similarly effective contribution to coexistence.

where islam is concerned though, events in denmark point out that such a level of mutual tolerance is still way off . even less extreme examples of islamic politics fail to inspire a confidence that muslim communities are ready to offer any support to efficient coexistence in identical or contiguous zones of time-space. the rift between the seculars and political islam in turkey is additional corrob oration that even in more homogenous populations, such tolerance may not come easy.

i find the mohammed cartoons published by the danish paper jyllands-posten abhorrent because of terribly bad taste and depressing lack of humor. neither can i approve the use of mohammed to censure uncouth hordes of uncivilized persons who claim to be his followers. in my opinion, the very just criticism of islamist violence in the cartoons has lost its impact because the reverred prophet of muslims who is totally innocent in the contemporary massacres fanatics enact in his name, was selected to denounce the act of hooliganism committed by muslims.

however, as far as the invioolable freedom of opinion and expression is concerned, neither the lack of taste, nor my (or anybody's) approval, nor the essential wrongfulness of the carricatures can justify their censorship or worse, their censorship through death threats, lethal assaults and the very ruffianism of the islamists that the cartoons mock. in itself, this is an indication that too many muslims are probably incapable of the kind of tolerance that can breed efficient multicultural coexistence and neither are ready to stand corrected.

oh, the catch here is quite ironic: if that level of critical, pluralist, democratic tolerance is ever attained by the muslims, there will remain scant need for switching to multiple juridicialism.

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(1) to "read" instead of interpret, view, place etc, is a verb usurped by postmodernist literature but it was used by (mainly) marxian and liberal writers, too, in the pre-postmodernist era. let us note here however that many posties are continuances of the disgruntled marxian tradition.
(2) less by measure of population or area than the "exiguous" historic contribution its society has made to the economic and cultural collective acquis of humanity.
(3) this should be "read" as "reproduction of all functions of human existence", from economics to emotions; or all its actions, from baking bread to committing murder.
(4) i refer to robert k. merton' s terminology here: non-functional is just that; dis-functional plays a negative role in maintaining a functionally integrated social whole.

hussein's ingrown toenail

2008-02-14T15:25:00.004+02:00

it's like a sociological fault line: hussein obama is winning in every state that counts as ingrown america!

i guess the "race" is not defined yet, hillary can still garner enough delegates to enter the convention ahead and catch a safe margin with the super delegates as well; but the point is that hussein's drive is carrying a geography that commands two thirds of the largest economy in the world, or if you like, the biggest economy in the world itself, however ingrown...

problem: if, in this age of fast globalization, that introverted social force which worst bears the brunt of globalization, with the parochial idea of politics it endorses gets to determine what happens to the u.s. of a., the next elections may find america, "the vast expanse of land between new york and the pacific" drifting farther apart from manhattan and seattle; and hurting even worse, as the world's socio-economic gravity pushes its ingrown practices deeper.

like a tight shoe pressing an ingrown toenail!

bare tits & les têtes

2008-02-09T15:09:00.000+02:00

just a short note on the ongoing battle of the turks over the turban, first however, alllow me to congratulate murat altınbaşak, the amerikan türk, who commented on the contrast between the turks' battle for their freedom to give up freedom, wrapping their selves up like a constant potential sexual obsession and the emancipationist bra burning protests of 30 years ago. let me take this occasion to repeat my protest of turkey's intellligentsia and the political community, for consciously ignoring that head (or body) covering can only be considered a freedom to the extent breast baring bra burning also is!

then again, although the western concept of freedoms mostly (quite rightly) is much at ease with head covering or other means of islamic feminine concealment, i have yet to see or hear a covered muslim woman climbing to a prestigious, secular high office in either the private or the public sector anywhere in europe. in america, it is still difficult even for un-covered christian, even wasp women to attain top job spots.

i guess the european situation is less due to hypocritical practices than the probability that covering up really leads muslim women to a mental adjustment that denies them such success.

with global glee, i, president hillary, wed thee hussein

2008-02-07T13:14:00.000+02:00

see how super tuesday has turned out? it is all-out war between manhattan & california versus america, "that great expense of land that lies between them".

see how california and the northern east coast have carried hillary to a precarious advantage of about a 100 delegates?

now, with mainly the tramontana states remaining, obama does seem to have a slight advantage until the democratic convention, where -esppeciallly after dubya and the kerry disaster- the independent delegates should be expected to consider world awareness as a factor that makes or breaks a nation, as well as president.

besides, just because i paint hillary as the global queen here, it does not make her a total sissy at home either, the gal does come from arkansas, no less pious a grass roots belt state (indeed, it's probably the grass she walks on that saps her popularity with all manners of hillbillyism)!

the best idea roused however, is hillary for president and obama as vp. though barack hussein seems to be a bit too ambitious to accept such propositions at the moment, a good politico is also a good opportunist and he surely knowss at his age, a successful term in office is almost certain to carry him over to the presidency.

for a change,too, barack hussein would be a vp the world could hear from, since gerald ford - who alllegedly could not chew gum and walk simultaneously and made a name only by climbing after the dethroned r.m. "tricky dick" nixon to a decidious presidency. did anyone really notice al gore living in the white house?

if democrats, who so far proved themselves incompetent enough to lose against dubya the first time and face him with no less a political genious than the reverred senator john kerry, can manage this right and pair barack hussein with hillary, they can look at a 16 year stretch in the oval office. and better for all concerned, including us here in the lepers' valley, a u.s. presidency that harmonizes the worries and concerns of the global political-economy with those of the largest economy on the globe, the tramontana america, they might build the century's dream.

hey, the man's called hussein, that should give him an in even with the islamic opponents of america (*).
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(*) this is not a below the belt joke, most backwards warm up to familiar signs and symbols instead of complicated ideas to grasp.

afghani execution of the western idea

2008-02-06T00:42:00.000+02:00

i am flabbergasted!

to the best of my knowledge, some six years ago, a western coalition under american leadership invaded afghanistan, ousted the taliban and their infamous sharia regime, won the hearts and minds of the afghani, established some semblance of democracy and enhanced modernization at great cost and considerable loss of troops.

the taliban were bad because they ran the country arbitrarily by islamic canon, sharia. they hanged people, they harangued and oppressed women, there was no freedom of expression, etc.

the coalition's intervention gave an end to all that, held democratic elections and hamid karzai's so-elected rule/regime made sure that there was no turning back, in the name of the allies' interests.

all right so far...

but who can explain how, in the de-talibanized, democratized, modernized, hamidized new afghanistan under the auspices of the allies, a kid who studies journalism happens to be on death row currently, sentenced by a sharia court and awaiting execution by hanging, for downloading and spreading some text on how women are ill-treated in islamic countries?

is there a difference between us (*), as represented by karzai, who, no matter who denies it how vehemently, is the pawn of us western interventionists and the taliban if that kid is hanged? can anyone really believe that western powers are powerless to pressure karzai to free the boy?

won't it be the idea of western virtue that swings at the end of that rope?

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(*) turkey,too, is part of the coalition - our presidential protége, hikmet çetin held high office in afghanistan, so i can rightfully say "we".

hillary vs. obama? no, global new york vs. local chicago

2008-02-06T00:08:00.000+02:00

wow! it's super tuesday already!

before bedtime in bodrum, early returns have arrived: huckleberry finn is the first victor in g.o.p.! the exciting race, though, is still between barack obama and hillary clinton...

i wrote in the previous post how the gigantic political-economic force of the u.s.a. is "divided" between an extroverted, global sector and an inbound, home-oriented economy that is rather indifferent to world-wide dynamics. extroverted america represents only about one fourth of the union's total economic acitivity but not only is it far more productive and efficient per capital dollar, it also is the largest element in global transactions by far.

two thirds of american productive activity is directed for the home, however. i speculated that the recent crisis and the intervention of the federal reserve are bound to reflect on that introverted sector, drive and motivate it toward competitivity and integration with global economy.

in classes, i usually identify extrovert, global america with new york, which indeed, is the world's true capital city; and introvert america with chicago, which is the center of america, "that vast expanse of land between mannhattan and california" (1).

is it a coincidence that the very local, almost parochial obama is from illinois; and the outgoing, world-smart ex-first lady, the globalized former governess of arkansas, hillary clinton represents new york?

[p.s. - the financial markets, struck by the crisis, did not take long to regain their balance. this may be read as an indication that the so called recession or stagnation will be overcome by a ruthless and fatal conversion of local, introverted, unproductive industries/services to global competitivity all over the world; slightly at the expense of chindia and other slave/corvée economies. such recovery and/or restructuration will naturally have to be financed through the world's capital markets which have to work at a healthy rythm.]

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(1) quoting homer simpson...

is that crisis echoing in my bowels?

2008-01-24T20:57:00.000+02:00

the great andre gunder frank once defined crisis (roughly) as a situation where the current balance is so disrupted that it can never be regained in the same place as it was lost.

the recent crisis that shook the stock markets, started davos-going captains of economy arguing whether we're dealing with a slowdown or a recession, appeared to be more or less taken under control in 48 hours by the world's exchanges, thanks a goodn deal to the fed's somewhat belated intervention.

since the balance was regained, then we can't speak of a crisis, right?

wrong!

***

this one, is not a crisis that can or will greatly jar the stock markets, which are likely to function as shock absorbers to this quake. the actual impact spreads deeper into the core of world economies, kicking their behindsto up and catch with the tidal waves of globality.

the fed naturally took the world economy as a whole in consideration whille making its move but its actual target was the rejuvenation of america's economy; more precisely, opening up to the world the in-bound economy of introverted america that i recently mentioned in a post.

america's economy, on the whole, is probably vital enough to survive at least a decade of what is conveniently (but mistakenly) referred to as isolationism. however, strong is hardly synonymous with competitive. in america, as well as all over the western world, many jobs and subsequent incomes were forfeited to rising new economies as chindia and adjacent countries. many businesses that fed americans in the 1970s have now moved to asia - and africa is in wait for asia's leftovers. in the last two decades, the global wealth from hi-tech goods and innovative services kept unqualified job markets in the west as full as cotton mills once did, but slowly, a saturation point was achieved.

following the logical course of globalization, the only way is to rev up homely economies; the traditional businesses that have made fortunes and have built america into the largest world-economy by far, to levels of competitivity where they can do the same for (theoretically, at least) the entire world. in practical words, it is a question of making a cadillac as rational an option for a hungarian family as a honda borrowing the capital from turkey.

obviously, such an undertaking can achieve success only through a major reconstruction that has to follow a calamitious crisis and recovers some new balance at far higher average levels of technoology and innovation. for instance, like developing a hybrid engine that runs on laughter, to keep the cadilllac moving at no cost...

as a rational means of setting a huge economic potential that corresponds to three thirds of the country's total might in motion, whipping consumption is the obvious best option. low interest rates are imperative both to boost people's spending and to encourage businnesses to more productive ventures.

hence, the crisis is one of inadequately productive economies, rather than a financial shake up. sure, the financial system will have to adjust and adapt to the new impetus but will have to keep it going unless it, too, risks a majestic corollary collapse.

and hence, a brake is going to apply on the rolling train of globalization - a trend already in motion since the eu enlargement and the recognition of the recent polish plumber syndrome by the european public. this, in essence is a period, favoring home-grown economies over the "foreign" (*); a respite for local, regional and national businesses strained under the unfair competition from chindian goods, so that they can have a chance of getting back in the game.

not a return to mercantilist protectionism of course... the new term is more comparable to a referee interfering with a boxing game in order to give a fighter slugged below the belt time to regain his breath and composure.

what about the working class? after all, marx's proleteriat is the essential body of consumers that keeps the wheels of economy turning. the western working man, now faces the challenge of becoming a productive force in itself, so that his labor becomes the indispensable element to keep the economic world going on - the only such labor is that of the mind, so heretofore beginneth the real knowledge society.

now, let's take a look at chindia et.al. - the so called emerging economies that, in reality, are exiled or exported enterprises from the west.

despite the protests, it seems mathematically solid that globalized business has contributed to the welfare and wealth of those remote places, in many instances at the expense of the western proleteriat. if capitalism is not suddenly going to metamorphose into a charity system, that mutual advantage is going to be preserved.

however, where chindia et.al. are concerned, it needs to be reitirated that we are talking about an economy, where the capital, the technology, the know-how and decision processes and even the markets are dominantly western controlled. and although an impressive number of scientists, technicians, managers etc. are increasingly assuming responsible roles and some prosperity does transfer to the states and administrators of host countries, without the western input, the whole chindia et.al. adventure is, kindly, kaput.

consequently, the time has also come to call chindia and its upsetting influence to line; i.e., toward a more systemic organization where unfair advantages will not hamper core western establishments inordinately where the essential principples of capitalist competition are concerned. as a matter of fact, china, for instance is a slave market with an unending supply of dirt cheap labor - which is also summarily dispensable, too, as work accident stats testify. the situation does not change much elsewhere around, either. chindian goods emit more than their fair share of effluents and carbon gases, consume too much energy, are known to be produced with harmful materials (as toys that children have bought in turkey) etc., etc...

in other words, chindia productions are susceptible to regulatory censorship from western markets and consumers, due to a plethora of shortcomings in their philosophy of state (or raja or sheikh or bwana or sultan) managed capitalism.

thus, a ball has started rolling that will not come to rest in its point of origin, although it is likely to cross a "turbulent" and tumultous path. that, in the words of the great andre gunder frank, is a crisis.

what i attempted here is a conjecture about how the path of the crisis must travel for optimal overall results. crises, though, are not famous for following rational, globally optimal courses. stupidity is one virtue humanity has insistently maintained, since adam gulped down eve's apple. after all, politicians are going to be instrumental in the way this crisis is to be managed. and history bellows loud enough for even the stone statues of yesteryear's politicians to hear that wherever politicians and states are involved, the effluence is weirdly attracted to the fan.

one last word: there is also an irrationally rational possible (though less probable) and impeccably humane course, the whole crsisis shindig may veer to: a revival of the 1968 "hippie" revolution (**) - but that is to come later... the flower-power golden dawn of the polis as the abode and asylum of freedom, peace and wisdom once again!

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(*) foreign, as in chindia... since this is really an era of globality, however, there can be no backbreaking of such developing remote economies. another likely method of bringing the "foreign" home, is to increase home's share in the productivity of the foreign... imagine the istanbul stock exchange quoting vietnamese rice packing company shares!
(**) for those, especiallly ex-commies, who do not accept 1968 as a revolution, i recommend (again) the great immanuel wallerstein's "1968, revolution in the world-system: theses and queries", in theory and society, vol. 18, no. 4, july 1989.

the deserved misery of brokeback-wall-refugees

2008-01-24T20:19:00.000+02:00

i have long developed the conviction that the israeli - palestine question is already long answered: it is another of those squirmishes nobody really wants solved.

the status quo allows at once the israeli to reasonably shake off their backs droves of poor arabs who occasionallly tend to think blowing themselves up along with abraham' s other grand- children will give them a straight ride to heaven.

those arabs, divided within, due to greed, greasy political designs, avarice and incompetence are now particularly happy; since one side has finally won the graces of america and the other has justified iran's meddling in the region.

the peoople who suffer? they either enjoy the suffering or they have other agendas: nobody could really suffer a sleazy succession of "rulers" who have accomplished nothing since 1967, except to make them suffer more. "there are hospitals for animals in israel", a brokeback-wall-refugee to egypt from gaza was complaining to a tv reporter tonight; "we have no such hospitals in gaza for humans. we just want what exists for animals in israel for people in gaza".

sad rhetoric, possibly even true, too... but alas, why did the now brokeback wall go up, separating rowdy palestinians from both tame palestinians and israeli?

if they need israel that much for survival (and tthey do!), why blow their children to dust? what happened to the defiant joy that rocked half palestine the day hamas won the elections?

pain, suffering and misery are the bane of palestinians in this crisis for 40 years, and of course, that is sad. yet, a sadder issue is that the palestinians, at least since yassir arafat tripped both bill clinton and ehud barak on a course toward some settlement, have always made the choices that have rendered their lives even more wretched.

many refugees who jumped the brookeback-wall in the last 48 hours, probably harbor hopes that they can anchor themselves to a haven in egypt - itself hardly at the upper limit of struggling economies. most, of course, will not. the bokeback-wall will rise again high and stiff enough to break the back of anyone daring to seek refuge on the other side. as will rise more despondency.

this is the kind of misery that won't end even if every gaza dweller ties a bomb around himself and blows himself to jihady death. a misery that willl only break more backs, but will allow a gloating ahmadinajad to rationalize his existence and a sitting duckya to find worth in his self and deeds.

no, not possible... can one speak of a deserved misery?

the civilized civil war of americas and americans

2008-01-11T17:09:00.000+02:00

it is too early to comment on the outcome of the u.s. primaries but the message of the process is obvious: a civil war is going on in the u.s. of america.

nothing like the sad fratricide of the 19th century; this is a far subtler, insidious but deep lying and possibly attritional struggle between the two politico-economic forces defining american power: to put forth a rough basis for the argument, let me point out that three fourths of the huge u.s. economy is introverted, takes place within the country. only one quarter of american output is global. naturally, economy, being the most easily measurable quality in social sciences, is less determining (in the orthodox marzist sense) than indicative. an introverted economy also points out to a "way of mind", a culture and assorted subcultures looking inward. since that introverted community is, on the whole, extremely privileged, too, it tends to become conservative, protective, xenophobic, apprehensive and vulnerable both in its moral and political preferences.

we are talking about two thirds of the populace of the most powerful nation in the worldç feeling threatened by a remote world that is competing with them in the areas of their traditional livelihood; chinese goods flooding them out of jobs, indian imports threatening moreç while alien immigrant cultures establish their bivouacs in hitherto all american communities...

on the "other" side, there is the "global" america that describes the shapes life can flow into around the whole world. an america of top notch science and technology and innovation and social liberties aesthesia and finesse etc.

no wonder the night obama and huckleberry finn - with chuck norris hopping with joy like a squirrel behind him- won the first race jay leno defined caucus as "a greek word which means every four years people will remember there is a place called iowa".

the let's-return-to-grass-roots double victory of obama and huck finn is a banner that there is some sort of a social war going on between america, "that vast, forgotten extent of land between new york and the west coast" as described by the comic character homer simpson.

then again, the mundane east coast that sandwiches homer's america moved to put them out of business in new hampshire. in grass roots america, obama and huck finn both represented the same outlook, ditto the global american party hillary and mccain represent.

my vote is for hillary (you do not expect me to back the republicans after dubya, do you?), not because i do not like barack obama but because he is too green to tackle this world where simple solutions are likelier to complicate the problems, rather than solve them. the two clintons are provenly abler to ride the buffalo.

the sad party is, if huckleberry finn -plus chuck norris who probably will then become secretary for the department of utter paranoia, a.k.a. homeland security- and/or obama win, everybody in the civilized world will bear the brunt of an unsuccessfully introverted america - reminiscent of when pres. wilson lost after world war I.

if (preferably) the clintons or senator mccain win, the global competitivity of grass roots america is likely to experience a boost as well as the global quarter, which, in practice, commands most of the world's economic activity.

dubya the (sitting) duck

2008-01-11T16:29:00.000+02:00

i'd be surprised if dubya and his crew were to do anything right after (especially) iraq but why in tarnation did he have to wait until he was a sitting duck before visiting palestine (and of course, israel)?

was it an overload of intelligence for the neo-cons to realize that all problems in the near east funnel through the israeli - arab conflict and until that is resolved, none of the issues washington claims to be attending - violence, al qaida (?), iraq ethnicities etc., even pakistan - are simply impossible to solve? it is not garfucius alone who holds that position, many students of world politics from noam chomsky to howard zinn have argued the point to anyone who reads or listens.

that is not because the israeli - arab conflict is the ultimate confrontation in the world but it is a battleground where all weapons and tactics are used by all parties to secure non-solution in this actual frontier of modernity with non-modernity.

if the israeli - arab issue is resolved, not only will iran (maybe i should say ahmadinajad-ism) and other forces of darkness will l0se a sublime cause for self-justification, the festered rules of desert despots all over arab states will have to shake camel dung from the hems of their jallabiya and strut toward civilization.

unless they are going to be crushed under the economic output of emerging nations like chindia, the comparably richer near east arabs have to get fast to a level where they can export more than oil and so called "terrorism".

why was dubya so late? was he hoping for a rift among palestinians? not likely; if he had such clairvoyance (or the means to induce such clairvoyance!), he could have seen the big picture, too.

maybe the near east is the fade out gate for presidents moving out of office.

if hillary wins, it may turn into a blast-in porte for the clintons, though... bill had almost made a watershed headway before he left. a final victory will instate him/them as the last royal couple in world politics... even if it may cause hillary a second term.

shop to open again

2008-01-09T12:31:00.000+02:00

hello, i am sure you have missed me. had to close shop for medical reasons. will be back soon but need to warm up a little first.

look at what's been happening since that i could not put in my two bits' worth of wisdom: muslim pakistan snuffed out the last and sole remaining candle of hope on its hopeless trek toward civilization, while relatively, its arch enemy godless india has taken off already...

americans are so happy with almost a decade of running about as a global superpower as coherent as a headless chicken that they almost decided to replace dubya with dubious, more commonly recognized as barack obama (*), possibly just because they want to maintain oval as oval instead of oral, as far as white house offices are concerned...

the u.s. fed has put the brakes on globalization - the way we used to when we were young, riding bicycles that did not have working brakes, i.e., wearing out the soles of our shoes...

meanwhile chindia (**) have become the scourge of capitalism, now that oil has topped $100 a barrel. a new world war is expected to gain control of petroleum producing areas. however since wars are expensive enterprises as even dubya is learning, when prices of cheap chindian goods hit celestial levels because of oil procured at the end of oil wars, they will have to sell their merchandise in world markets at the end of bayonets...

well, i've been out on my back three weeks or so but the world is as crazy and absurd as ever.

thank heavens and their consumers...

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(*) one of turkey's supposedly top tv anchormen, mehmed ali birand apparently cannot pronounce obama, he kept calling the candidate "barak omaba" in a number one fm radio commentary. i have to admit though, that the man's name sounds more african than american. (**) china and india are more than emerging markets in some eyes, they are emerging powers, too - among which some also add russia. such illusions always happen to those who view the world as a playing field of nations and their states rather than deeper forces: after the opec oil embargo in the 1970s, everyone was weary and reverent of the arabs and the 1990s were supposed to be the decade japan would finally rule the world, etc., etc. so, i turned the emerging powers into a merging concept.

of men and norms

2007-12-12T10:22:00.000+02:00

one of last week's most bizarre incidents was the death of a motorcycle rider who hit a standing truck wearing no helmet.

so far, ordinary is it not? by law, motorcycle helmets are compulsory in turkey, and to my knowledge, all european states. here, especially in summer, the mandatory condition tends to evaporate with the heat, to the degree where even mounted cops ride wearing only a baseball cap, because some genious desk-jockey has not included the helmet as part of their hot weather uniform! in america, some states require it and some leave it to the rider. in many parts of the u.s., there exist sizable movements to repeal the helmet requirement on grounds that "protecting my life is my own privilege and concern, not a domain of intervention by the state". ok buddy. you free to croak... jes don't do it in, on, under or over my vehicle... drôle, drôle, drôle...

but our guy in question had just left a conference -which he had joined on his own free will - extolling the virtues of safe motorcycle riding with full protective gear, helmet, boots, knee pads and so on...

events like this raise the question of the relationship between men and rules.

excluding such accidents of political history, as saudi arabia, iran or pakistan etc., where rules exist to keep -often naturally submissive- peoples subdued and supplicant; and are, more often than not, arbitrarily enforced, just as they are arbitrarily made, norms serve to establish some sort of an order over impersonal social relations. in general, legal structures favor extant power structures and serve the interests of power wielders. still, there can be no societal order, even in saudia, where the normative structure does not also answer some needs, albeit at the most basic, of the general public - there is your basic gramsci for you.

as power becomes more diffused, so that society can maintain some effective control over the state and its political machine, norms begin to order social life in an inevitably "reasoned" (*) manner, that is more instrumental in serving the interests of almost everyone concerned. as reason wins over rulers' whim, although qualitatively more efficient, norms become fewer in number. even in the european union, there (probably) exist laws that favor big business, but there are also quite live rules that protect the common consumer. every ordinance is rationally designed to best avoid violating third party concerns, while solving problems for -hopefully- the entire populace.

drawn under such rational systematics and methodology, also open to alterations or even abolition, through equally rational and methodical criticism, such normative structures create a collective intelligence and collective wisdom that not only orders but also facilitates social organization and cohesion. a german or a dane refrains from diving into a one way road from the reverse direction, not because he is not stupid but because he recognizes that if that becomes a habit, he will end up losing far more hours than the few minutes he can gain. the "ever-clever" turk (or, still, the mezzogiornian) who tries to cut a corner eventually gets to block a whole road, a whole junction, a whole traffic flow and still sits on his horn in total indignation.

in short, individuals' control and sway over their social life-domain arms them with an armor of collective wisdom, so that they do not even have to be clever. in the third and a half world, however, a quasi-clever band of malfed nincompoops forever perpetuate a guagmire of total collective idiocy continously pissing into it.

no wonder such pathological personality manifestations occur, where one attends a meeting that propagates safe riding bike and on his exit, bangs his bike barehead into the back of a garbage truck.

like getting out of an alcoholics anonymous meeting and hopping into the first watering hole next door.

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(*) inevitably reasoned because otherwise the social machine will not function and be wrecked.

do not take sarko seriously

2007-12-11T16:17:00.000+02:00

m. nicholas sarkozy, le president de la republique de france has reportedly placed a stumbling block on turkey's supposed path of accession to the european union.

of course that is not truly the whole case: turkey's current situation concerning the eu is, directly, pacta non sum servanda, promise unkept! we simply have no sincere intention of becoming european; of not parking on sidewalks, of not shutting dow parties, of observing traffic lights, of respecting the law and others' rights, of living together without screwing each other, etc., etc... relax, i am not going to harp on turkey's impossible road to europe, not today at least.

the consensus about sarko's motive is that he is pushing turkey into a sub-pact of the countries of the mediterranean basin, which, he hopes, france will be leading.

nothing new here, it is an ambition inherited from napoleon, whose clumsy invasion of egypt in 1800 forever settled the anglo-saxons in the mare internum. france re-tried in 1956, together with the new imperial loser, the not-anymore-so-great britain and israel but barely got away before america gave them all a good slap on the wrist.

france, since losing algeria has had its eye on becoming the political pilot of the mediterranean nations but especially since the 1990s, was challenged by italy, too, which harbored similar ambitions but of a lesser tenor. the barcelona process of 1992 expired without creating a spirit of unity but squeezing fry the "soul" of the mediterranean, in part because of that rivalry.

and of course, like it or not, the mediterranean is actually an american lake since the world war II; and unless a serious challenge is in place, no continental contender will be allowed to put on too much brawn to contest the u.s.. they cannot, anyway... not with wahisngton's lackey, britain in their midst, breatihnig down europe's neck as a transatlantic fifth column - general charles de gaulle was apparently right in vetoing the pommies off the eec (what the hell are they really doing in the eu anyway? they are an island as remote to europe as japan. they do not even drive on the right side of the road or use intelligible measures! even turkey is more european!).

so, as far as the med is concerned, france is in the position of the married man lusting after somebody else's mistress. sarko le presidente tries to slip one over the americans sometimes and plays the game of france france über alles... that's all there is to the imaginary french primacy in the mediterranean...

in the aftermath of ww II, britain, still nurturing the illusion that it was still a world power (why do brits have that knack of deluding themselves that what pleases them not, in actual fact, actually, is not. really?) had shunned turkey off nato that ankara wanted to join to the price of thousands of troops killed in korea. britain was hoping to use turkey as a cornerstone in a chimerical mediterranean pact, which london would be leading - hence, controling the passage to india and the oil flow to europe and the world. not only america and the soviets but also even the arabs proved too clever for such that english ploy. the sixth fleet ended up dominating the bluest sea in the world, turkey (for whatever its worth) became a nato member and britain since, is america's lastest star even if it is not not spangling the banner.

so forget france or sarkozy, turkey's fate vis-a-vis the eu is only and only a function of its real integration with world capitalism which has proved a far stronger force of nature than either. and the first rule of capitalism is democracy that is a sine qua non of european/eurogenic rationality.

there is no need for stumbling blocks to place before turkey when it comes to rationality and democracy; we trip over our own toes treading toward that direction.

stately anomaly

2007-12-04T12:48:00.000+02:00

oh lord! sunday i wrote how the stately governor uzun of isparta, commented on the route of the crashed atlas jet, speaking as a quasi-aviation authority that high state service seemingly injects through occupational osmosis. therefore, more often than not, any turkish state (definitely not civil) servant by the nature of his office, is privy to everything.

akşam reported tuesday that the governor was the first (and by then only) person to mark how the plane had veered of its course!

repeat, the governor, who by no means is an air traffic connoisseur (unless he is a private flyer, which is darn unlikely), happens to be the first and only, repeat, first and only, official who could say the aircraft was apparently flying on a wrong bearing, according to the paper!

the news here is that the paper completely misses the anomaly in that situation...

unless the might of the august state incites some to do with their tongues things tongues are not supposed to do...

stately agony

2007-12-01T14:15:00.000+02:00

agonize freely: the governor of isparta, some şemsettin uzun, flew over in a chopper where the atlasjet crashed, in order to to inspect the wreckage and reportedly declared "the zone is not in the flight route of the aircraft, it should not be where it is".

as obvious to anyone interested, in turkey the state is the ultimate in everything. therefore, it has to have a hand in everything. unlike in democratic practice , governors in turkey, for instance, are appointed "state officials", a term preferred over "civil servants" because the state is there to be (*), not to serve .

so, a governor, representing the high authority of the state in some province, is the ultimate authority on everything by the unspoken of bibles of officialdom. the ultimate arbiter...

hence, his excellency gov. uzun, after inspecting the site of the incident by air, according to newspaper reports, has expertly rendered his opinion as the speaking voice of the state. behold how his knowledge of aviation is so obvious in his recount of the event: "we flew over the wreck in a helicopter. all ambulances are there. it is impossible to fathom how the plane landed (**) there. it crashed on the other side of the ridge. it is a wooded and somewhat rocky area. the aircraft is a mess. we (***) are sorry. that area is not included in the plane's fly-over zone. they informed that connnection with the aircraft was lost at 0300 hours. the tower sighted the craft. they even gave (relayed) the meteorological reports. (the runway was) reported clear to land. the plane was suupposed to make a turn over burdur. there was a break of communication" (****).

can you doubt his official authority and his word that the plane was where it should not be and forthwith crashed?

so, having been enlightened by his excellency, hürriyet's inspired headline to the governor story: "curious statement about the crash".

going on with the "curious" statement, or more of the sophia of state: “the fuselage is there, the wings are not so much. half the fuselage. there are scattered parts right and left. we shall go to the site by land to be with the citizens. we are very sad". tthen comes the governor as a human: "i have not seen anything like this".

whence goeth all the sophistic expertise?..

oh lords of ignorance, glory of eternal triumph is yours!.. may you forever ban promethean lights lest they may shine lucifer's torches on your endless swamps of hebetude...

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(*) try to imagine a nightmarish versioon oof the existentialist dasein...
(**) direct translation from hürriyet's report.
(**) the much apppropriate royal we.
(***) the statement in turkish, as reported in hürriyet: “enkazın üzerinde helikopterle uçtuk. bütün ambulanslar orada. uçak oraya nasıl indi anlamak mümkün değil. sırtın öbür tarafına düşmüş. ağaçlık ve biraz kayalık bir bölge. uçak perişan vaziyette. üzüntülüyüz. o bölge uçağın geçiş alanında değil. uçakla irtibatın kesildiğini 03.00'te haber verdiler. uçağı kuleden görmüşler. hatta hava raporlarını vermişler. iniş için müsait denilmiş. burdur üzerinden dönüş yapacaktı. orada bir irtibatsızlık oldu.”
Gövde var, kanatlar pek yok. Yarım gövde. Gövdenin ön tarafı var. Sağa sola serpilmiş parçalar var. Olay yerine kara yoluyla gidip vatandaşlarla beraber olacağız. Çok üzüldük. Ben böyle bir şey görmedim” diye konuştu.

adding insult to agony

2007-12-01T13:49:00.000+02:00

the plane crash in isparta gave the media the field day they have been craving since the bogus war fervor of a few weeks ago. a horde of scandalous ignoramuses now roam mountainsides, fly over the wreckage, "peruse" security cameras for a drollop of sensation to jolt us readers and viewers; most of whom are glued to the news-that-is-not, oscilllating between the joys of having survived a far away accident and the vicarious lethal reminders of how fragile we are.

some "news" hyenas, as if their papers and stations on "normal days" do not represent a dormitory of information employees, brag that they were the first on the scene - to do what? shoot a few tons of torn metal debris among autumn foliage? they do not even have the gall to make public bloood and gore!

the only news that matters comes from two sources in air crash incidents: lists of passengers that airlines make known, and the cause of the accident which the civil aviation authority discloses after an arduous study, if the black box is found. the rest, including the commentary by so called aviation experts, is speculation where it is not taurean excreta.

pretending to do something that cannot be done, the media, this once, have invested in an imaginary enigma of "sabotage" theories, having found out that some top turkish physicists were among the casualties. yet other reporters for the public and virtual grapevine, further blamed nuclear energy proponents for having the scientists blown apart...

when intelligence so dramaticallly drains from public experience that even common sense becomes a scarce commodity, reason and decency, too, ebb from social relationships. just as any member of the great driving unwashed can bust unannounced and unwelcome into your lane at any intersection, another mindless half-life form (with an unfortunately long half-life) extracts is/her kicks from what is grief to you.

adding insult to agony; chiefly, the agony of having to suffer so much human effluent.

kill women instead of men?

2007-11-30T13:33:00.000+02:00

a court in izmir sentenced a man to 30 years for killing his son in law and his father while wounding her sister. the court reduced a life sentence to 30 years because the judges ruled there were extenuating circumstances: the man committed the crime under heavy provocation when his son in law declared "i have used your daughter for five months and here is ytl 750 as her rent".

turkish courts seem to be rather lenient in murder cases - in recent months, many men who murdered women "under provocation" received radically reduced sentences due to mitigating conditions- one killer for instance is expected to get out in eight years or so.

yes, it is true that the tally of the angry father in izmir is bigger, two dead, one badly wounded - but i cannot stop myself from wondering whether killing men draws heaveir punishment almost instinctively.

turkey speaking for al qaida?

2007-11-29T15:02:00.000+02:00

i read it in radikal last sunday and waited for some follow-up denial or confirmation from the government or the newspaper itself which did not come. i still am not sure how true it is but reportedly, tayyib efendi, who mustered his party's mp's for a weekend camp in kızılcahamam some 40 miles off ankara, told them at a closed session that unless the u.s. and western europe accept the pkk as a terrorist organization and act accordingly, turkey will not refer to al qaida as terrorist either but as a resistance organization.

this report came after he defended turkey's developing ties with iran in spite of america as "sound, realistic diplomacy that looks after turkey's best interests"... mainly, that there is trade between the two neighbors.

recently, i wrote about how tayyib efendi & co. & rosy have collectively turned turkey into a spokesnation for iran but even i, in my eternal pessimism, had not fathomed that our neo (or moderate) islamist global function as mouthpiece of evil could have extended to serve al qaida.

i am still hesitant to comment, because an iota of commonsense logic still whispers in my ear that even tayyib efendi, who undergoes an undying love affair with his own voice and his rhetorical abilities could loosen his verbal reins so far that his tongue runs amok.

if so though, turkey, whose world policy has been mainly decided according to the words and deeds of two persons in the last four decades, namely, mr. rauf denktaş of cyprus and abdullah öcalan, recently of the imralı island, is launching on a new course far more dangerous and harmful than the one that has placed it as 84th among 117 nations as regards human development (according to the undp's classification).

let us hope for bad journalism on part of radikal but if you ask me, the sole fact that nobody can off-hand refute and disregard the probability that turkey has become a mouthpiece for al qaida, something even ahmadinajad's iran has not dared, under the "rule" of tayyib efendi & co. & rosy is bad enough in itself.

ask me about istanbul, oh how i hate it!

2007-11-17T11:57:00.000+02:00

i hate istanbul. i never loved nor liked it. istanbul always was, to me, a plethora of villages heaped on top and beside each other. its layout, its structure, its organization but most importantly, its soul, only add up to a dirty, messy, noisy, disorderly, uncouth travesty of urbanity, stomping on reason and civilization.

and please do not refer to the classic lie of istanbul's imported role as some sort of a carrier of a quasi-urban "high culture", emanating toward the provinces: colonial or semi colonial (ex)capitals love to delude themselves, pretending that affecting an order of add-on, thoughtless mannerisms, borrowed from colonizers, can pass for civility. the only "real" (1) civilization this land enjoyed and savored until the istanbul-ankara uni-central axis tromped on it, was in the aegean, the quintessence of the mediterranean.

semi-colonial economies are wont to colonize their own territories. likewise, greedy istanbul, hand in hand with ankara, the obsessive seat of political power and control, colonized the aegean, too. in an inevitable process of integrating with the world markets (2), as an agency of globalization, it subjugated the lifelines, exploited the vitality and sucked the fortunes of the entire country, only to channel the booty abroad... after taking its (however meager) commission, of course.

during the process of colonialization by the istanbul-ankara axis that devastated the aegean, too, izmir, the only city that really deserved the epithet since the ottomans was the first casualty. traditionally, the first source of both original and adapted novelty in turkish civil and social life, izmir's prominence in a resourceful region allowed a self subsistence and sufficiency that was the legacy and the earmark of the ancient "polis". its historic aloofness and freedom from the "center", afforded izmir an almost natural autonomy from the central authority of the axis. that autonomy was quite pronounced until the mid 1950s but began to come under the spell of a nationalizing central economy steered by the axis from then on.

the jacobin, despotic, centralist axis could not easily brook any form of autonomy that might threaten to get out from under its comprehensive political control. therefore it also preferred its business to stay under its thumb, rather than let a fairly independent local bourgeoisie flourish. the empire suffered and tolerated izmir because the aegean meant revenue from agricultural exports - likewise did the republic for a while (3).

slowly, the relative autonomy of first izmir, the beating heart of the region, then of peripheral "paradises" like kuşadası or bodrum were destroyed. their local economies, indigenous, idiosyncratic and particular means of physical and intellectual subsistence were thoroughly dried. from the commandeering of the marketplace to architectural destruction, abusive exploitation and avaricious commodification of nature and history, often in the form of real estate marketing, killed almost every single originality. gradually, standardized styles of existence that plagued the "modernist charade" of istanbul and ankara, pervaded and shrouded all aspects of aegean originality, with its packaged and mediocre commonplace culture.

istanbul's role in this chapter of turkey's history, was to spread throughout the land the disease it itself caught a hundred and fifty years ago. the de-culturization that captivated the populace in a frenzy of getting richer without actually getting rich, simply aggravated when a barely fledgling economy got inevitably dragged into the throes of globalization as of the last quarter of the 20th century - just as it once had in the mid 19th century.

the loss is actually far bigger than can fit few paragraphs: the only hope backward economies as turkey, mexico, india etc., whose cultural accumulation has also proved mostly uneconomic and un-saleable on a universal scale, could only hope to win a proper seat on the bandwagon to globality to the extent they could merchandize the originalities that shape and distinguish their methodologies of life from other societies'. such originalities are mainly cultural goods that may be adopted, adapted or interpreted for the global market in tastes and ideas. döner kabab, though quite pedestrian, is a sample. on the other hand, the paintings of yavuz tanyeli, for instance are (4), an example of universalizing the arcadian of the highest quality.

some call this process "glocalization", i believe glocality is a more appropriate expression.

turkey significantly lost its claims to the international market in glocal goods too. through political manipulation, istanbul's subordinated, externally imposed, second (if not third) hand, foreign designed and foreign dependent, inferior political-economy that evolved from import substitution, turned into the national focus and locus of economic activity. this so called "development", illuminated by the eggregious lack of sight typical of the istanbul-ankara axis (5), subjugated all forces of production and with its control over the markets, usurped the corollary power of piloting consumption, which in underdeveloped political economies, often also serves as a motivator of mentalities.

in the end, while the rest of country, including the historically productive aegean and the mediterranean, became graduallly necrous; istanbul, fatally sucking their infected blood and dead tissue and social effluents, turned into a swirling cesspool. however, through its global links, it succeeded in remaining the main vent by which some oxygen could penetrate the guagmire.

istanbul could create such a colony out of a dead empire and a fairly large nation state by the standardization of uncouth masses that re-conquered it and became the customers of its second hand, second rate merchandize, ruralized physical environment and increasingly lumpen culture. originality in everything but most significantly, in taste, was abandoned to mere availability. curiously, even function was seconded to it. the contagious poor taste that began to define istanbul spread like a plague everywhere, causing havoc with thousand years of historic, archaelogical, cultural and architectural accumulus in aesthetics, as well as social know-how. the most visible effects were in architecture; as a history of imperial aesthesia was demolished, "skyscrapers" that are but dwarf by world criteria, soaring next to criminally ugly cubic housing projects and mudbrick slums, began to compete with ancient istanbul's two millennia old skyline.

istanbul's self defeating and self destructive mental attitude still reeks like a rank odor issuing from a body dosed with deodorant instead of taking a bath. istanbul badly failed in becoming the urbane and mundane "city that civilizes by being civic". it had no authentic urban culture to offer or impose on immigrating hordes except its affected manners, and whatever existed of the urban way of mind was flushed into the growing cesspool, as the invading, or re-conquering (6) peasant masses flooded the city (and all could-be cities) with their rural habits of thinking and living.

then what the hell am i doing here?

first of all, i am a prisoner of war: the aegean having fallen, i was dragged here by circumstance. second, the process i extrapolated above has left bodrum and the aegean as such barren mental landscapes that bore me terribly after a while... third, i have trained myself so in mya captivity, that my hate and disdain of istanbul do not prevent me from enjoying what it still has left to offer (6). in some sort of a revanche, i am exploiting the last remaining joys of istanbul.

i almost never express an affective stance to objects and subjects i know little about and istanbul; well ask me about it... yes, i do hate istanbul but that does not mean i do not appreciate it. i admire its historicity. i explore, experience and cherish what is left that i can access of the heritage of two millennia, trying to place the new occupants of yesteryear's plush capital on a map of time-and-space. i greatly dig getting lost in the old town behind the walls; riding in and out of nondescript alleys that pass as streets, watching women languishing on front porches of now derelict houses of once posh districts, kids kicking balls in the dust as slothful, swarthy, somber, stubbled men uselessly slump in coffee shops.

when i feel like i am in a land invaded by aliens, i simply escape...

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(1) whether in the old glorious days of the empire or the post westernization contention between renovators and traditionalists, the manners of the palace were hardly a model for the being and behavior of the masses. basic modes of existence were divorced from the military imperialism of the palace and went about in the vein of the mediterranean urb structured in the millennia of phoenician-greco-roman maritime glory. it was this "civil" and civic nature that central authority stomped on from mid 19th century on and especiallly during the process of building a nation.

(2) "market" should not be viewed as a narrow, economic concept but in an anthropological sense as a meeting place of people and their communicated ideas and messages that establishes the "market" as a nucleus force in society, as well as and above a venue of tradeable goods.

(3) izmir created its own bourgeoisie that threatened to develope into a social force to challenge the authoritarian absolutism of the center. the ankara-istanbul axis eventually pressured izmir into submission in the 1980s, by swallowing its economy into the swirl of globalism. izmir's budding capitalism was hardly given a chance, even the yaşar group was swept under. today, izmir's basic economic worth is reduced (back) to manufactural level. however, the town's insistent rejection of intellectual self-development, embracing of parochialism and provincialism were also quite effective in its downfall. izmir or the entire aegean were never articulate about the existential virtues of being mediterranean, because intellect as a treasure was never appreciated until too late.

(4) some works of yavuz are currently on exhibition at the art fair in istanbul modern. what yavuz tanyeli needs to become an effective global cultural force is to find a savvy, mundane, capable art dealer who can market his art all over the world.

(5) in the way of empirical support, suffice it to recount that not one square inch of metropolitan istanbul is properly planned. another sample that pertains to the cultural: the city's mayor in the 1980s, who tore down maybe more than 500 hundred century old buildings and landfilled half of the bosporus and the marmara coast to build new roads, mr. bedreddin dalan, himself an engineer with no interest in history except banal references to a glorious and islamic flavored past, declared the dolmabahçe palace an unimportant building with little historical significance, made by a mediocre architect. dolmabahçe was designed and built by master balyan, the imperial architect of armenian extraction. not only did it take topkapı's place as the house of sultans, it was the place where atatürk died. even those facts are enough to qualify the invaluability of dolmabahçe as a historic and historical monument. why, then, did dalan make that unfortunately ignorant remark? because -after his mentor turgut özal- he too, wanted to assign the gardens of the palace to build the swiss hôtel. result? the sewers of the hotel still often flood into the basement of the palace.

(6) the reconquest of istanbul is the spiel of prof. necmeddin erbakan, the guru of political islam in turkey, the mentor to president abdullah gül and p.m. tayyib erdoğan (his son is named after him). of course, the allusion is to true muslims deciding the fate of the city again.

rosy sequel

2007-11-14T16:17:00.000+02:00

when rosy of the tayyib efendi & co. & rosy made president of turkey, i was rather loath to accept him for reasons of public poor taste: his compulsive and maybe also revanchist yearn to climb to çankaya sort of left his cohorts on the wrong footing - contrepied, as the french would say... then, he instantly broke his promise to encompass and embrace all citizens etc., etc... all those, although unpleasant, were natural if you consider his political roots and inclinations and did not fully deduct from his (well earned) political right to be elected.

the aesthetics i was (and am) piqued by, pertain to his political attitude and in my judgment, jeopardize the authority of the station he occupies: i remember abdullah gül as a member in his mentor's cabinet, that of the islamist necmettin erbakan formed with the now (thank heavens) politically deceased ms. tansu çiller(1). i remember him in the pose of the supplicant, erbakan's stance identical, too, his head bowed slightly to one side and his hands tied before him, being tongue lashed by the strongman moammar qaddafy in the latter's tent during a state visit to libya.

therefore, his icky, uncalled for and unheard-of-in-state-protocol rush to the visiting saudi (so-called) king' s hotel suite in ankara, to me was and is not a surprise but a sequel with more to come.

ring-around-the-rosy?

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(1) ms. çiller, unfortunately, is preparing for resurrection, her candidacy for leader of the democrat party is in question. the misfortune here is not in ms. çiller's chances of a comeback (less than nil) but the utter plight (plague?) of the so-called opposition in turkey's pathetic politics.

is turkey the spokesnation of iran?

2007-11-14T15:30:00.000+02:00

turkey initiated a potentially significant political raprochement between simon peres and mahmoud abbas bringing them together in ankarato address the turkish parliament. one would imagine more bells would ring in the western press but online issues of the ny times, washington post and the guardian did not carry the ankara rapport this morning.

bad journalism or turkey's perennial incompetence in currying the appropriate public relations for its good deeds? this is the only nation that accepted hundreds of thousands of fleeing kurds from iraq during the gulf war of 1991 but was reflected in the (western) world media with shots and footage of a frightened buck private beating an onslaught of zillion refugees into order with the stock of his rifle.

now, the israeli-palestine leaders' meeting is being swept under the carpet, probably for the sheer reason of ankara's wishy-washy attitude in the matter of iran, neither denouncing ahmadinajad's regime, nor endorsing it. thus as iran's universal prestige slides lower and lower, turkey somehow clings on to the sinking body.

simon peres said after meeting with abdullah gül that the only point they could not aggree on in otherwise "very favorable" talks was the turkish president's bias toward iran.

american apprehensions over turkey also touch upon the increasing ties between ankara and teheran. tayyib efendi goes to washington and finds it upon himself to mumble in defense of iran's nuclear "energy" program.

turkey and its diplomatic machinery are busy giving the impression that they are slowly beginning to assume the role of a mouthpiece for iran.

why? chiefly of course, because of tayyib efendi & co. & rosy's reluctance to relinquish their obsession with making something of turkey's (predominantly) islamic population. as they simply melt in front of a so called "king" of oil rich desert nomads; they cannot realize that ahmadinajad's islamic republic is less a source of diplomatic-political credit than an anathema.

then, it is quite probable that their religiously tainted narrow weltanschauung causes them to establish false linkages: they try to trump american unwillingness to crush the pkk with a turco-iranian gas deal and go on to advocate iran's very dubious and possibly devious cock and bull "right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes", although the mullahs do not even know what to do with their oil and gas and iran certainly has an energy surplus. again, they may be assuming quite incorrectly that supporting that spiel will "punish" israel for not sufficiently mobilizing the jewish lobby to block the armenian genocide bill in the u.s. congress. that is also why they are still undecided whether hamas is a militant off-shoot of iranian aggressiveness or the "legitimate" representation of palestine.

tayyib efendi & co. & rosy are not intellectually equipped to realize that -unless you are a vacuous pretender to a role of superpower like russia- speaking for the devil often gets you tied to the stake. the problem is, you go mostly unheard, and you do not make news unless you go up in flames.

who's carrying whose flag now?

2007-11-11T22:56:00.000+02:00

i just watched a singers' contest on bbc-prime "conducted" by the legend, placido domingo himself.

the contestants were all in their 20s, young up and coming stars. it was a visual feast for my ears. the second and third prizes were ties, and shared respectively by a chinese soprano and a russian tenor and a russian speaking tenor and bass.

the first prize went to soprano isabel bayrakdarian...

somehow, i missed under what flag ms. bayrakdarian sang, though i doubt it is armenia and certainly not turkey!.. miz isabel is definitely of turkish-armenian stock: "bayrakdarian" means the "child (son, actually) of the flag (standard) bearer" in turkish. the obvious conclusion is that her family were quite trusted servants of the ottoman political (perhaps also military) hierarchy. a surmise is, the family had to leave turkey after the tragedies of 1915; the "genocide" according to many and the "armenian uprisal, forced migration and killings" according to turkey.

whatever happened or why, history hardly ever favoring one side alone in a controversy, however sad or cruel, i deeply regret this very moment that regardless who was right, turkey, an independent, relatively powerful and greater state, never came up with the political flexibility and the ideological, cultural, psychological suppleness to work out the ways and methodoology of leaving the tragic incident and its time weary traces behind as another dark page in history - which, in this part of the world, are far more than glorious white ones.

isabel bayrakdarian could now have been crowned as a turkish (*) singer. she would have once again hoisted the flag her forefathers used to carry with honor, her voice gracing ears, minds and hearts, her charm adding gloss to her glory.

isabel bayrakdarian won, what a loss for turkey's universal presence not to share in her victory!..

today, a hürriyet columnist wrote that the "only other belligerent nation in the world after america is turkey"; so that the world has come to identify us with war.

how many times can one lose the flag carrier, over and over? sad, apparently, may be a choice where the wise becomes invisible to the mind in search of resplendence.

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(*) not as an ethnic but historio-geographical reference, i could as easily say "a singer from turkey".

gone and unfortunately not known enough to be forgotten, even...

2007-11-09T14:33:00.000+02:00

mübeccel kıray has passed away. she was probably the brightest, most insightful, enlightening turkish scholar, who, unlike muzafer sherif, the renowned psychologist, for instance, chose not to break her ties with the country.

kıray was born in izmir, the year the republic was declared. she studied anthropology, a brand new social science, at the then newly founded ankara university; taught sociology and social anthropology at the middle east technical university (metu), london school of economics, istanbul technical university, marmara university and university of texas, austin.

kıray contributed to theories of modernization and social change by pointing out to the very significant (especially as developing societies are concerned) phenomenon that modernity is not an accoutrement that is linearly attained by emulating the same forms as the capitalist western societies. she proposed that intermediary forms and buffer mechanisms/institutions occur which mediate the passage from one social structure to another. such institutions are, by themselves, neither modern/capitalist nor premodern (feudal) or agrarian. they belong to the period of the passage, to be left behind as progression to another stage is complete.

kıray's theoretical contribution was a blow to the development theories and policies of the 60s and 70s, which constituted the cultural - political aspect of american hegemony and maintained that the formation of western institutions in the third (and third-and-a-half) world would ensure their transition to modernity. when the theory failed, u.s. backed colonels' coups and authoritarian regimes erupted all over...

every turn of turkey's - or possibly, chile's or pakistan's - history of cultural transformations provides a plethora of events that corroborate kıray's theory; from instituting educational establishments that teach more hype than knowledge and science, to strange interpretations of modern-ized legal systems so that gabriel garcia marquez's story of south america, red monday, is reenacted in batman, eastern turkey; or perrennial messes in traffic that result from a collective idiocy that institutionalizes the ignorance of organizational norms.

today, i asked my class to name turkish football players in foreign leagues. they counted at least six.

none of them knew who mübeccel kıray was...

the traffic of anti-americanism

2007-11-01T18:07:00.000+02:00

anti-americanism in turkey is like the traffic problem in istanbul (1): it is a serious problem because there is nothing serious about it! and i'm not musing either, this is a very serious statement.

traffic is a disaster in istanbul because, instead of adopting and abiding by universally standard rules and signs designating how roads are to be used as public property, every driver, every pedestrian, every traffic administrator, every planner, every infrastructure builder and even every onlooker is guided by one sole canon: expedience...

there simply is no detectable reason to question and improve. nobody stops to wonder if my expedience is expedient for you, too; and if it is not, whether your expedient presence in the off-side quadrangle of a junction may very inexpediently blocking my way.

actually, that causal sequence is called logic and it is observable in some lower species as cart drawing horses and even oxen.

hence, everything in istanbul traffic is a mess. the sole motivation is that of rushing spermatazoa in a race to impregnate some - and in this case, unavalilable - ovum. the turk that is the most to hurry and harry, the first honker when the light turns green, is often the one who will bolt to the coffee shop to sit doing nothing except maybe play a card game with chips instead of a deck- more expedient than cards because you don't have to hold them in your hand while you're chain smoking...

hating america is expedient, too. it leaves no time for auto-critique and/or self loathing that is corollary to an inflated collective ego when bruised - which again, happens often. it is also very easy : at the current phase (since 2000) the u.s. of a. boasts the most conveniently hate-able and hate-attracting western leader this side of 1945. dubya is a global hate magnet (totally mis)managing a worldwide (2) establishmentthat is america .

hating and blaming america is easier than sending your daughters to school, respecting the rights of the man crossing the street or acquiring a profession for your livelihood instead of going about as a born-expert on every matter from driving to army commanding and to state administration. it certainly is safer than bickering with your "rulers", too.

the friction between turkey and the u.s. is caused far less by confrontation than the utter ignorance and incompetence dubya and his neo-cons have displayed in their pathetic grasp of the world. unless an equal ignoramus wins in 2008 - which is why i am praying for hilarious to win, so that billy boy can handle the world and its beauties with his peculiar aplomb again -, a world wary and personable president can mend the fences in two weeks. remember how clinton had his nose squeezed by a slimy kid in the quake zone and at that point, could easily be elected turkey's next head of state (3)?

so you see, these are serious matters only because if ever attended seriously, they will vanish instantly. traffic is a matter of optimizing the use of available public volumes, not of usurping and vandalizing them. corrective punishment will suffice to bring the bedlam to reasonable ordder. international or cross-national sympathies or antipathies are simpletons' surrogates for contemplation of interest optimizing and are subject to instant change if the right sentiments are harped on. something even dubya can do (4).

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(1) istanbul is symbolic here because it is the extreme case. all turkey is afflicted with the same mental and behavioral disease of maniacal vehicle handling. for example, the republic day weekend, at bodrum's deadly torba junction, within the space of two minutes, three cars and a truck raced through the intersection with no chance of stopping in case of obstruction. the crossroads are lit ss ugly as a cheap sailors' brothel but worse, stupidly misleading in the ways they are placed and in their garish colors that completely baffle an unaccustomed driver. meanwhile, there exist no traffic lights. the reason cited: traffic lights will cause accidents because nobody will obey them anyway. the significance of the torba junction among thousand similar others in turkey is that a young pop star/actor tragically died there past july when crushed by a truck charging through. entire turkey shed tears over him and cursed mad drivers and every single body, from retired traffic cops to my barber, suggested remedies to make the intersection safe. still, everyone sppeeds through it because the junction is at the bottom of a downhill stretch that extends to a (rather mild) climb that is more expediently challenged if one hits it fast!
(2) the exact word would be catholic but is prone to confusion with the ecclesiastic usage
(3) in fact, he was going out, and turkey was trying to name a president, who turned out to be a. necdet sezer. some writers, i recall, did jocularly suggest, despite his fling with monica, that bill clinton should be given the job. i still do! he's fun at least.
(4) some turkish football teams are playing for high stakes in european tournaments. if i am aware of that, the political secretary of the embassy in ankara should, too... here is my bet: a little timely cognizance from george bush le fils, supporting one (or all) of those teams; or a team-colored baseball cap he wears in case one can make it to the top, will be enough to stop, if not turn the evil tide.

making sense to kurds

2007-10-30T13:20:00.000+02:00

no science, no art, no philosophy, no literature, no environment, no democrats, no finesse... issues i and a number of other left-outs have always complained about as huge gaps of knowledge in the turkish modes of mentally constructing the world.

now, we are facing as a nation, a gross ramification of thinking with our guns instead of our minds. our democrat-free democracy has long created an ogre that has gnawed on turkish society for years and now threatens to mangle it: a feud between turks and kurds, that is mutually suicidal rather than fratricidal!

ten years ago, a division of the country might have been hypothetically possible without destroying the essential make-up of either ethnic community. now, even on paper, such separation can be but fatal for both. since the 1990s, millions of kurds have spread into the country, which is also their country, so that ethnic strife can only devastate both entities that constitute one nation. however, not only rampant turkish nationalism but also the cultural customs of kurds and their particular articulation with their turkish compatriots can at present be listed as psychological distances that belie physical proximity.

what do we know about this anthropological - sociological and pychological phenomenon that bears so much dormant risk to our vey existence? nil? most possibly... why? because in our denial of a kurdish entity, in our despisal of academic inquiry, we simply ignored the study of the kurdish way of mind and life. worse, we jailed anyone who dared to study the kurds as a specific social actuality. i know many young scholars who have researched kurdish life and culture in situ but all as affiliates of universities abroad. i doubt any turkish academic institution has any worthwhile and reliable data, studies or publications on a matter that directly pertains to the country's life-lines.

how are we going to live with people to whose minds, souls and praxes we are so indifferent? how are we going to communicate with them? whether on the north or the south of our borders, how are we going to reach out to them and make sense to them as partners in life? certainly a reference to a millenium of shared geography and politics is not so satisfactory any longer.

instead of science, learning and thought, we have tried to ensure political unity only with our guts and guns, since the 1821 uprising in the peleponessus. it seems there has occurred no change in our grasp of the world ever since, wielding nietzche's hammer all the time, we see all problems as nails.

hope we do not bang it on our thumb this once...

washington post colonialism

2007-10-26T10:06:00.000+03:00

last night, erkan (see link to erkan's field diary above) and i had a rendez vous with a reporter from the washington post visiting istanbul to investigate the surge of anti americanism in turkey. we were supposed to have dinner together and chat, so we went to a favorite taverna with erkan to wait for him.

the fellow stood us up with no prior or posterior notice of regret.

furthermore, i understood he also stood up haluk şahin, another bilgi professor and went to talk with soli özel (1), still another bilgi university instructor who also scribes for the post on occasion.

big deal... who in a sane mind can hope for proper conduct from a journalist?

yet, primary school etiquette tells you that if your are not going to be able to abide by a promise, keep a date etc., the civilized act is to call, write, whatever and apologize. that is because the human interfacce of modernity dictates that we are all equal (even journalists, unfortunately). our time is equally important and precious, and to keep somebody waiting is stealing from their time, i.e., their life.

it was the colonialists who usurped the time and lives of their vassals in the old days of imperialism.

what cheek! so like a puny pukka sahib, this discourteous fellow from the washington post has the arrogance, the impunity, the audacity, the ill-mannered, uncivil rudeness to impose himself into our schedules, also abusing the credit we accord a beloved colleague; impinges on our time and has the gall to be so impolite as not to apologize for disrupting the flow of our lives, as if we are pariah!

and in total blindness of this pretentious, grandiose, colonialist attitude displayed in its name by one of its employees, a major american newspaper inquires into rising anti americanism in the rest of the world, after they dispatch this boorish would-be colonialist to do their investigation as if they have no other person to send

then, in absolute hebetitude, they do wonder why anti americanism has become a global tide!..

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(1) soli is a right person to see. this commentary no way implicates him but the rude and purpose defeating demeanor of the post reporter, some amar bakshi.

los bandidos desperados

2007-10-24T10:24:00.000+03:00

in türkiş garfucius yesterday, i suggested that the pkk should not be referred to as a terrorist organization. not only is terrorism the worst defined concept in the world (even worse than aggression) that it has no meaning anymore except as a word of denigration for any act or actor that displeases one side in a fracas, it accords the other side a measure of implicit legitimacy. "one man's terrorist is the other's freedom fighter," runs the well used (and abused) cliché.

i insisted that the pkk is an organization dealing in common crime and must be treated as a gang of common criminals. i was wrong, i apologize...

a "gang" is, sociologically, if not by historic origin, more or less an urban, therefore a civilized phenomenon. it assumes by definition, some sort of capacity to organize, albeit, outside the law, which requires some sort of adaptive autonomy in members' actions.

the pkk arises from the rural world of the peasantry and the corvée of the east. the only organization it can manage is through forming a rigid hierarchy. it cannot form a gang because autonomy is impossible without disbanding. that is what the pkk is: a band.

they are not gangsters but only rural bandits. or, using the term from a culture they are more akin to, los bandidos desperados.

let us not exalt them or ascribe them any legitimacy, however dubious, by calling them terrorists.

intelligence

2007-10-22T14:13:00.000+03:00

it is better to remain silent when reason is blown into the storms of rage. sometimes it is wiser to let things take their course, even toward catastrophe.

perhaps that is why, at one point in time, gathering information about your antagonists and kneading them into konwledge of the world you are dealing with, came to be called "inteligence".

and whatever the power of weapons, as military history tells us, victory depends not on how many bodies you can afford to bury but on how well you know the ways of coming home leaving back as few unmarked graves as you can.

intelligence, after all, begins in the mind as a capacity to recognize and formulate problems... a capability to ask the right questions, rather than move forth upon well worn answers.

good luck!

where intelligence fails, luck is the only thing you can count on. but then, luck is often a matter of probabilities and a fairly intelligent analysis of them.

tell me about putin and how russia can put in (part I)

2007-10-18T11:49:00.000+03:00

for the deep turkish psyche, russia signifies the invincible evil behemoth that ate up the ottoman empire. barely a century ago, the tzar's generals were drinking vodka and celebrating their crushing victory over the sultan's unsubstantial armies a stone's throw from the palace by the bosporus. russian soldiers were flirting with the girls of agio stefanos, or, with the name we know it by today, yeşilköy - just south of the atatürk international airport that lies smack in the middle of istanbul.

fear and aversion of russia was so ingrained, turkey was the only country in the western bloc where a communist party was totally and often violently banned from 1923 to 1990s, until communism collapsed. this is a weird contradiction since turkey's political, economic and cultural structure reflected a centrality, homogeneity and monotony that any sovietic-socialist government would envy (1). even today, as even a blind man can see, very typical of sovietic socialist social organization, in turkey, the state is far stronger than society (2). in my (not so) humble opinion, that is why turkey is doomed to remain a mediocre presence in the league of world politics but that is not the issue now. suffice to say, cold-war turkey was less threatened by the idea of communism as a political regime than russia, which was communist, and could use the "partnership" to manipulate turkey.

the issue is russia. particularly after vladimir putin last week put (3) his foot in the near-eastern soup cauldron, in support of iran's suicidal, as well as homicidal nuclear craze... and now that turkey is preparing to nose-dive into the gravy, moscow has reemerged or has been remembered as a factor to reckon with.

some 10 years ago, when the soviet weary and wary west was drowning its dollars (no € then) in boris yeltsin's vodka glass, i was busy maintaining that it was a waste. russia would (and will) never garner the paper-tiger power the soviets did or were made to look like they did.

then putin began to put in his magic wand to the brew. very despoticallly, he created a plethora of non-capitalist but private conglomerates which practically expropriated the state's resources. these conglomerates functioned as privately owned and managed companies under state control. they had access to gigantic material and financial opportunities and soon turned into fairly competitive players in the global market. they were large, big, sumptuous and fairly competent in world trade but inside, their colophon read "property of the ex-sovietic state of mother russia" (4). in one way, russia's economic success that putin put in the books is a matter of reorganization with efficiency in mind; something all bureaucracies can achieve if some despot puts his mind and devotion in it. the russian on the street was already oriented toward a middle class lifestyle in the late soviet era. recent economic growth let poverty drop and a middle class grow. foreign direct investments - mostly in energy enterprises- increased, too.

however,russian economy is still relatively a backward one, using the measure that says a developed economy is less dependent on income from natural resources than the power to transform them into commodities and services... russia's exports consist by 80 percent of oil, natural gas, metals, and timber (5). the industries that the world's second superpower was once so proud of, are derelict and unproductive.

this portrait leaves russia as a minor economic power world-wide but supposedly affords it the brute strength it can bully other states with. can that really be so?

russia still finances its growth and its progressively middle class welfare with what it exports to the prosperous west. a fossil energy crisis caused by, say, a russian embargo (which is singularly unlikely by reason of insanity) may undermine the west's economic security for a short while but russia thus forfeits not only its chief revenues (6) but also almost all of the monies that flow in through its borders for other reasons.

so, in effect, russia is a bear that barks (is that what bears do?) with ultimate reluctance to bite. and this is only the economics of the problematique, without going into russia's entanglements with its own "democracy" and its ambitions over control of the mainly oil-based wealth of the asian "turkic" states.

thus, russia's political worth appears as a derivative function of what it signified as the empire of evil during the cold war. it is basicallly, an assumed power to scare. it is invalid once people refuse to be afraid of it.

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(1) one time turkish premier tansu çiller had complained while grappling with the resistance to privatizations that she was trying to "dismantle the last remaining communist state in europe", in the 90s.
(2) a chief criterion for karl august wittfogel (1957) to distinguish an oriental despotism.
(3) putin had put it in previously too, when he let europe freeze over gas prices.
(4) since the union and progress party led "revolution" of 1908, the equally strong and inbound state apparatus of turkey has been trying to do the same, with little success to speak of. turkey never dispensed the opportunities and finances as putin put in the russian "private" companies; for fear that any emerging social force could topple the state's ultimate supremacy. all it offered was conditions for profitable (in many cases, profiteerable) import substitution between 1958-1982; at a time when second tier economies were turning global.
(5) cf. cia factbook
(6) 32 percent of the state's revenues according to the cia. by the way, iran, too, needs to finance its nuclear craze as well as its wayward allies as hamas with oil revenues.

tayyib the khalifa

2007-10-16T13:18:00.000+03:00

tayyib efendi was addressing an organization of his party late last week, on occasioın of the bayram. as always, when speaking to an adoring, supportive, sycophantic and non-digressing group of devout disciples, his training as a religious rhetorician got the better of him and he let his tongue loose, to run before his mind:

"we are the government of all, we are here to serve all" he stated. and after the applause subsided, he rolled on "we shall serve not only the muslim, we shall serve the christian and we shall serve the jew... if there are any, we shall serve the buddhist and the atheist, too".

we are used to tayyib efendi's habit of confusing himself with the ottoman sultan or the khalifa of islam, forgetting that he is a citizen, perhaps primus inter pares (1) but still a citizen, of the republic of turkey, a democratic state where, although threatened, the primacy of its secular law is supposedly universal. hence, any government has to "serve" not only any citizen of the country but also visiors residents who are the beneficiaries of the protection turkish law affords everyone.

tayyib efendi often loses this distinction between religious and secular law, simply because his scope of the modern world sometimes slips out of context and into the ottoman (or worse, mohammedan) era. pretending he is the khalifa of islam, his tongue begins to run loose before his mind. that is what happened at the bayram speech. "we serve regardless of anyone's creed, because that is the custom we inherited from our history," the primus inter pares raved.

he conveniently disregarded that it is his obligation to serve the whole country, including not only non-muslim turks but even the foreigners within its borders. it has nothing to do with history, customs and traditions or tayyib efendi's family upbringing. any government of the republic, including his, is there to serve all, muslim, atheist, christian, devil worshipper, jew or pagan because they are duty bound by the law of the land! because the constitution says so...

the realization may disappoint tayyib efendi but he is neither khalifa nor sultan. for the moment, he is primus, because his pares have assigned him the duty of protecting the law of the land, under whose democratic principles, we all are equal and deserving of the services of the country's governments.

that privilege includes tayyib efendi's politically and artificially elevated self, too. whatever power to serve is also vested in him through that law, which he has sworn by honor to uphold!

as a citizen with mixed spiritual affinities and a fairly rational mind that suggests the logic of atheism, i think i am entitled to tell tayyib efendi: "just do properly the duty you are appointed to, oh mighty one! if my forefathers had wanted a sultan or a khalifa, they would not have deposed what they had... apparently, those they disposed of were better than your esteemed self, otherwise you would not be yearning to emulate them".

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(1) first among equals

ready to rage

2007-10-12T11:22:00.000+03:00

the king of off-road, ktm motorcycles of austria have a slogan: ready to race. you can take the bike off the rack, and push it straight to the track...

i propose a similar slogan describing the political attitude of turks: ready to rage!..

the typical collective or singular primary reaction to any adverse stimulus in this country and for our fellows is instant fury and displaying a disposition toward solutions favoring violence. the same was true last week when the pkk ambushed and killed 13 turkish soldiers (then, two more elsewhere) and later the u.s. house foreign relations committee adopted the armenian genocide bill. in the former case, preparations were hastened to lay the legal background for military incursions into iraq's kurdish territory; in the latter, threats were hurled at washington to hamper the u.s. war effort in iraq.

i am not going to argue the workability of turkey's poicy in either case except to note:
1 - they both simply and singly play with brute force options and reduce politics to muscle flexing; 2 - they are the first, almost automatic responses that come to mind, rather than fruits of a ruminative process of problem solving; 3 - in history, force has been the chief response turkey has opted for in solving territorial issues and almost each time, it has failed: when, in 1921, a band of rogues in the morea sparked the greek revolution, massacring their muslim neighbors (not neccessarily even turks), the imperial armies staged such a retaliatiory attack that some english politician said "grass won't grow under their feet", referring to the savagery of the janissaries. a more recent example, in 1923 and 1930-31, kurdish rebellions in the east were suppressed by force and compulsory migration in certain instances.

between 1821 and 1921, the ottomans lost their empire. the heir, the turkish republic, is still dealing with kurdish insurgency almost a century after it hammered down the first uprising. what other evidence is necessary to convince a people that the "favorite" remedy in the past served only to worsen the ailment?

for nearly three decades (1), the turkish political machine endevaored unsuccessfully to quell the kurdish (or eastern problem) by military might. whenever other, cultural, social, economic or political measures were raised, most were destined to bang into a wall in a dead end. kurdish members of parliament were roughly arrested, jailed, silenced; the most renowned kurdish novelist died in exile recently, a researcher spent a third of his life behind bars, journalists were persecuted... oops, sorry, prosecuted for mccarthy-ish interpreations of anti-turkish activities etc., etc...

the sole consequence of all that militantism was that istanbul turned up to become the largest kurdish city in the world!

when the armenian genocide debate began, i was a kid. the turks reacted then, just as they are doing now; and in 40 years, they have not been able to convince anybody who counts that there was no genocide of the armenians in 1915. one moment though, the sole exception probably is president georgewalkerbush alias dubya, who, in defense turkey, told congress before the voting that ottoman turks did not commit genocide, they just "mass murdered" armenians.

looking at the historic genesis of the problems plagueing turkey which so readily enrage us, should we not perhaps stop and take a look at how we are describing the "problems" ? after all, intelligence is essentially a capacity to recognize define and formulate problems, rather than finding (in our case, very instant) solutions or responses to percceived obstructions.

rage so obviously fails to win the race.

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(1) this is a very arbitrary dating. cutthroat kurdish separatism was on the rise before the military coup of 1980; indeed, was one reason cited for the army takeover. in the late 60s and early 70s too, right after the 1971 putsch by communique slackened its military hold over society, secessionist kurdish nationalism began to arm itself and get violent. the pkk and its imprisoned leader apo are offshoots of those early movements.

trt and the freedom to be unfree

2007-10-08T17:56:00.000+03:00

trt, the turkish state television managed to enrage me by showing a clip, in which a subcontinental-oriental man from pakistan or maybe afghanistan was singing praise to god and islam in english during an iftar (break-fast) program.

no, my indignation was to neither song nor singer, although if the trt, which scores the lowest ratings among all national stations, in spite of being the richest, technically best equipped and most extensively manned broadcaster in the land, is so keen on celebrating the holy days of the muslims with such glee that legitimizes unadulterated propaganda, i now expect it to run clips of happy christians singing carols in approaching christmas. as a matter of fact, since the trt collects various special dues and draws its funds from our taxes, it is obliged by law and common sense to treat all religions of all turkish citizens equivocally.

what infuriated me in the clip was the background to the song: a forest under rain, greenery and flowers all around, and a 6 - 7 year old girl child, totally clad in islamic costume, including head cover, waltz-stepping through the foliage!

the obvious message: regardless of age, a woman is an agent, an element of temptation and must be covered to keep out of sight of men who may not be able to resist the allurement of her sexual appeal!

i cannot understand male minds ruled and guided by the constant, concupiscent hankering and the complementary apprehension and tantalization of impending sex or sexuality even when grown, mature women are concerned. the mere idea that a supposedly human creature, equipped with a capacity to reason, can regard a 6 -7 year old girl as a sexual object is a complete anathema! the notion is repulsive, nauseating, disgusting, sick, despicable and because the trt which i only incidentally watch, continuously robs me of my tax liras, deplorably exploitative!

what is worse, i browsed the papers in the last two days to see if anybody else was as irked by the clip as my poor self... alone again, naturally.

on the contrary, in the media, i came accross a slant that drove me truly mad! some diddlebrains with their testes where their wits should be but apparently never were, defended dressing children a la islam, with head cover and veil etc., on the grounds that "it was their choice".

as corroboration of covering up with free will, they cited the childrens' own expressions that they wanted to wear the veil... "i want to dress like yoou do, mumma..."

i will not insult the intelligence of my readers arguing the validity of a minor's such capacity and access to free will. we all know that even leaving aside the oedipal social training of girls with mothers and other women kin as models, especially in oppressive, basically peasant communities where high islamic fervor thrives in this country, the child of a religious environment has virtually no choice but do as bid or shown. allow me to draw a parallel of evil, though:

child victims of sexual and physical abuse may (and often do) develop a bondage with their tormentors and many do not even want to be relieved from their custody into conditions where they can be treated normally. where, technically, lies the difference, if you force or coax a child to venery or faithful virtue by means of closing all channels of her developing a sense for freedom and will? then again, most child victims of sexual abuse are lured into the trap by love and affection, rather than coercion!

i am for as few restrictions of any freedom on a universal scale. therefore, i do not find in myself the right to oppose the right of those who wish to cover up, provided they are mentally sane and able. however, please do not expect me to show respect to the full exercise of the freedom to become unfree. it is abhorrent!

then again, i absolutely am for sexual freedom between "consenting" adult partners regardless of gender, method or taste. rape, molestation, persecution, abuse, and obsession are, by my standards, condemnible wantonness of the worst caliber, akin only to taking of lives.

and i am at terribly confused in distinguishing the level of evil between violating what is between the ears and what is between the legs!

the laz and the "papaz"

2007-10-05T13:09:00.000+03:00

in the last post i tried to explain the way the laz mind works and how that phenomenon spreads through the community by way of cultural osmosis (1) with increasing speed.

just as they are accustomed to shoot first and ask questions afterward (2), the laz have the habit of talking first and if at all, start thinking about what they said only subsequently, along with the audience. then comes stage 2, turning what was said around to mend or control the damage. tayyib efendi, who is originally from rize, and is a perfect laz, has demonstrated that trait countless times in his public career. he practically solved the question by appointing a special officer mr. atıf beki, to turn around and translate what he said into what he did not mean (or worse, sometimes into what he did mean).

as a matter of fact, tayyib efendi, persecuted by the approaching vote over the constitutional amendment, has recently gone absolutely laz and claimed that "eleventh in actual fact, means 12th".

well, good luck to tayyib efendi, but our target today is another laz, the father of the minor o.a., the assassin of father santoro of the catholic church in trabzon, who was a victim of slef declared jehad by a band of ultra nationalists. the "killer" was sentenced to 18 years of which it will be a miracle if he serves six. said his father, rebelling to the court's decision: "if my son had killed a mufti, they would have given him no more than eight years. just because he killed a papaz (3), they sentenced him to 18".

do not be misled: the speaker is not just a frustrated parent, he is a retired teacher, who supposedly has the faculty to distinguish right from wrong. of course, he is laz.

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(1) don't look up the term. i just made it up. obviously, it refers to the automatic transferral of cultural cumuli from one social group to another, simply by virtue of sharing the same social space. this is not a case of learning by observation or imitation. as in biological osmosis, traits seep from one element to the other due to differences of cultural density, that is, the ability or degree to which one group maintains and preserves its so-called identifying characteristics. (there you go! garfucius has rolled up another fold up his social scientific sleeve...)
(2) the laz love guns. they used to make excellent copies of famous firearms by hand for decades. when the turkish government could not outlaw guns, gun bearing or gun production, it legalized them, during the life and times of turkey's hero-saint of liberalism, turgut özal. just as other laz-ic phenomena, gun love, too, spread in society especially whereever the mental aspects of personality development ran slack. now, we have more firearms than we have people. anybody can simply shoot anybody else and not even has to ask any questions later. killing is so "normal", when a pathological sadist butchered eight family members couple months age, it hardly made front page news.
(3) mufti is a higher muslim cleric that corresponds more or less to a bishop or arch diocese. "papaz" is turkified from the greek papas, father and is used to desecribe all christian priests.
few turks are aware that papaz means father. the "lower classe" often use it as a term of derision.

i absolve the laz

2007-10-03T12:24:00.000+03:00

i have often wondered about the reverse-correlation between the eggregious plight of traffl over turkey and the socio-economic paradox that the "plight" is caused by vehicles whose ownership indicates a certain degree of economic achievement, which, on paper at least, requires a modicum of intelligence, of which at least some should be devoted to organizing the way those vehicles are used, which is not.

complicated? ok, cars are expensive (1); right? in order to buy a car, whether to use privately or to professionally haul third persons and goods, one needs to invest a fair fortune; right? that assumes, the owner of a car has to have an income which is at least a few times above the average per capita income; right? so, on a quite rough scale, persons who own motor vehicles can be included in some degree among the economic élites of the society (2); right? that, normally, indicates some success at business/work; right? except very rare and often decidious cases of pure dumb luck, such success cannot normally be achieved without some intelligence as the basis of acquiring some capital, acumen or skill; right?

then, how come those fellows, who, supposedly, are endowed with a certain degree of mental acuity, use their vehicles (or let them be used by third parties) in such utterly dumb and stupid fashion that trained circus monkeys and bears can do a better job? to put it another way, where goeth the brains that serveth the turk (3) for the acquisition of that chariot, whence it hit the road?
i have pondered a lot about that question and, it appears although the answer was before me all the time, i could not see it because of a technical - methodical mistake that blinded me:

my life long observations, heuristic experience and studies have led me to conclude that the laz (including cretans), who incidentally, are a "race" (4) that raises not only the brightest specimens of the local population, but also the dullest and most witless, are usually successful in life because of a single-minded purposefulness and obsessive perseverance over one single objective, to which all other acts of life simply append as accessories. for example, if temel (5), the proverbial laz, who lives in rize sets his mind on showing his new watch to his betrothed in istanbul, he can drive 700 miles in five hours only to discover at the bosporus bridge that he forgot the watch home; turns back, recovers it and returns in seven hours... when the laz are concerned, the dumbest individual can, at the most critical moment, do an incredibly clever thing that makes a physicist look like a dimwit - and of course, vice versa: a genious laz surgeon may forget the keys to his bentley in your left ventricule. naturally.

i missed the generality of temel-ism. i overlooked that the trait which distinguishes the laz is a universal human condition that i exclusively ascribed to the laz because its frequency and range are relatively higher among them to fairly consider a trademark. in that bout of temel-ism, i could not see that the entire turkish populace is affected by the same affliction! indeed, there seems to be a rapid laz-ification of turks recently... did you notice how turkish pedestrians wait for the traffic light to turn green? almost without exception, they step down the sidewalk on the pavement, frequently take a few steps onto the road, definitely blocking cars and putting life and limb in peril? did you observe how drivers honk and horn their way in at top speed through every gap in traffic only to brake hard and wait at the intersection, where they try to beat the lights, transgress into the line of crossing cars and cause a deeper mess?

i previously wrote that the mental faculties of an average turkish driver is generally equal to that of a sperm, rushing in absolute fixation toward the womb and the ovum in competition with 70 million others. that compulsive mental state is the bane of traffic in turkey. however, as jean paul sartre argued once upon a time, one's outlook in life is an integral attitude, you cannot be a a tender, compassionate torturer but you can be a neat one. so, if you drive like a sperm, it probably means in all walks of your life, your intellective modus operandi is equally spermatazoic.

thus, i now know why and how individuals who otherwise possess paltry cerebral proficiency, whose intellectual attainment hardly reaches the dizzying heights of mediocrity, whose cognitive universe cannot extend beyond a fetishistic devotion to football and a football team, have ably conquered the molehills of economic progress since the inception of özalism... a pathologically success(result) oriented single-mindedness, hinged on a totally iniquitous veneration of money and material gain that completely disregards the means and method over the end, has swept the ethos of society down the drain to the gutters of pragmatic opportunism.

then dawned the dark ages of conservatism...

once the normative structures of living together, which are usually the yield of decades, even centuries of urban praxes are destroyed by avid hordes, typically of parochial backgrounds, who cannot adapt to cosmopolitan urbanity, the commonest rubric ascends to become the canon of society. naturally, that most basic rubric is heavily perfumed with religious dogma; which by definition, is deficit to regulate the transactions of a modern society.

hence, the pervading, ubiquitous, pernacious, venal anomie that plagues the third and a half world.

i heretofore absolve and acquit the laz for all their social sins...

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(1) in turkey, proportional to income, they are even more expensive.
(2) in turkey, where dollar billionaires abound but few major companies get into the higher ranks of the fortune 500 list, economic élites, too, have a sub-mediocre standing by universal standards. so, owning a car/vehicle is a realistic socio economic status indicator within its particular community - frame.
(3) my definition of turk is rather generic and covers the north-western demography of the byzantine - ottoman empire, which, for me, one and the same historio-psychological entity. it includes ethnic turks, greeks (of hellas as well), armenians, kurds, the laz (then again, laz comprises all but markedly all eastern black sea people and very significantly, the cretans) and assorted apocrypha; some albanians, bulgarians, macedonians, bosnians etc... by contrast, the azarbaijani are excluded by reason of a separate mentality.
(4) a true laz is the member of a historic clan of indeterminate origin from the mountains of eastern black sea, speaking an old dialect that sounds like a mixture of turkish, greek and armenian. by reference, the people of the eastern black sea region are often called laz. they are attributed a special mentality, humor and character that has inspired at least 40 percent of jokes in turkish. they resemble those the french tell about the belgians.
(5) temel is literally, foundation; actually, a greek word, themelion, of the same meaning. it is also one of the most common - if not the commonest - name among males of black sea extraction.

iran, the sliding ground under china?

2007-09-27T16:37:00.000+03:00

how bad really is the nuclear threat iran poses for the modern world? a new york times photo of a square in teheran shows that the leitmotif of street decoration in the persian capital consists of a display of weapons. the scene is pathetic, actually... a backward economy, an oil-poor nation trying to secure itself a place in the world as the spearhead of islamic jehad while being despised and feared by the muslim world around it.

the scene in nyt is reminiscent of the latter-day soviet empire. naturally, the much further modernized russians paraded their arsenal with much more aesthetic coreography but the essence remains the same: dread me, for i am guided by fright myself. like russia under communism (*), iran is pressed under economic problems of all sorts and since it has a totally and thoroughly oil dependent economy, its sole choice to maintain its awkward and retarded power structure under the disguise of national integrity and islamic jehad, is to bribe a jobless, profession-less, generally ill educated hordes with oil money (**). the already overloaded military expenditures are bound to take a toll on the state's budget and the public's welfare in due time - which cannot be too far ahead.

therefore, just as it drove the soviets to the same corner, it is in america's interests to push iran to spend more on military matters. the main factor that may slow washington from pushing teheran to bankruptcy is the imponderability of iranian leadership. more specifically, the u.s. considers the probability that once squeezed into a corner, iran's bizarre and idiosyncratic president mahmoud ahmadinajad may try an attack on israel and the buttcake may hit the fan. however, that is, ahmadinajad knows just as well as everybody else, but a suicidal option. not only because militarily, iran's success is not anywhere near a plausible probability but a war will devastate its moribund economy, too.

now, increasing the economic pressure on teheran by expanding the sanctions, nyt reports, is more of a possibility since ahmadinajad went overboard with the nuclear threat in his u.n. address which assured any civilized person on this earth that he is not compatible in any aspect with modernity. the europeans are now likelier, as president nicholas sarkozy of france indicated, to back america's policies against iran despite "dubya" bush - mainly, economic and commercial sanctions based on boycotting iran's oil trade and crumpling its revenues. the imponderable factors here figure as russia and china, who, it is feared, may continue cavorting with teheran and may even attempt at solidifying some buyers' monopoly over its oil.

russia is a card laid face down; however, china is much more susceptible to pressure from the west even than iran, in the eventuality it tries to circumvene the blockade against ahmadinajad's belligerence. chinese development and prosperity rest on imported capital and technology, as well as clement western markets. chinese products, whose prices are not exactly determined in a fashion foreseen by capitalism-proper, threaten western industries. if the west openly or secretly pressurizes china and "punishes" it for dealing with iran, despite the coalition of capitalists, a trade ban or limitation that only requires china to comply with the basic rules of market economy can leave china commercially stranded, with lots of cheap produce it cannot sell in any of its "natural" markets.

thus, the nuclear situation may serve not only to rob the chief evil, iran, of its own treasury, it may also help drag china, the economic loose cannon, to toe the line of proper capitalism.

russia? it currently survives by selling oil. is it going to re-sell the oil it buys alone from iran? import and re-export chinese toys and motorbikes? big deal...

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(*) not that the ex-communist led neo-tzarist russia has left that corner behind it...
(**) actually, not with oil money even but oil itself... when the sanctions and military spending forced the government to cut down on free petrol rations of the people, a rare mélee against the mullah regime broke out recently.

autophagia

2007-09-22T12:59:00.000+03:00

recently of issue is the so called sociological phenomenon of "peer pressure" (mahalle baskısı). the secularist/laicist masses are afraid/wary and warn that once relgious symbols as the head scarf are let free, peer pressure will cause those who now ignore them to abide by religious dress codes, too.

what is more, there exists positive evidence that the current administration is willing to encourage such pressure. an advisor to the prime minister just made a public statement condoning government contractors who made their wives cover their heads, so they can win tenders. "well, it is better they pull themselves together," he said; "if they want to do business".

hmmm... implication one:

in turkey, politics still consists of seizing the power and the means of the state and distributing them in partisan fashion to cohorts and minions, through an hierarchical pyramid, depending also on the psychological distance the beneficiary maintains to the center. this qualifies as a form of "patron - client" relationship but differs in that it is historically ordained: in the ottoman (and previously byzantine) system, the state was almost the only way for upward mobility aqnd prosperity. bureaucratic promotion depended on which clique of grand vizirs or vizirs were on the rise or on their way to the executioner's rope. peer pressure was a method of consolidating relations within one faction, and also tightening loyalties.

the same is true of any centrally operated system of distributing benefits. in diversified, democracy-oriented societies, interests are far more impersonalized, and are defined and sought collectively. that is why parties exist. rather than base policies on distributing the assets of the state (which, theoretically at least, belongs to everyone, rather than just the ruling political party and in practice, is getting smaller), they clear the way for the particular groups they represent to realize their goals, without license to harm or destroy opposing social forces.

in turkey's lay, non-political society, too, the same pyramidal hierarchies persist: with the weakening of the state and bureaucracy, a quasi-feudal structure of landlords and notables arose in turkey. they had tenants whom they had to "look after" in a paternal (patriarchal) rather than patronal model.

when the state's regime softened with the advent of democracy and more or less modern - capitalist modalities settled, the two branches of the paternal system merged. most of the previously externalized landlords and notables found their niches in the political system. thus, they, too, accessed means that they could dispense among loyals and entrench their local powers. then, as feudal ties further loosened, smaller but still paternal patterns of affiliation with a distinctly "business" rather than agrarian character dispersed in society. today, such "cliques", mostly based on locality or some sort of kinship, play an important function in all parties.

ferdinand tönnies was the first philosopher to put a finger on the machinations of this phenomenon, with his famous gesselschaft versus gemeinschaft dichotomy. simply put, the model pits the impersonal and anonymous urban (society) relationships against the more intimate rural (community) where personal ties, group pressure, social control play a heavy role in maintaining cohesion. obviously, the dichotomy lies on both ends of a continuum of capitalistic development.

the first implication is that, despite politicians' and media mythologies of economic development and success, turkey, one of the world's 20 largest economies, is still a state-oriented, over-centralized bureaucracy.

hmmm... implication two:

abiding by and strictly observing islamic rules may put souls at ease but they do not guarantee success in an open economy, dependent on technological development (*); where innovation is next to synonymous with free thinking.

this is the islamist's quandary in turkey: more and more, turkish capital and capitalists of islamic origins are appearing on the global scene of trade, not simply as merchants as they once did, but as consummate commercial agents in a fatally competitive market, where knowledge is not limited with what one learns by experience. neither at home nor abroad, can such economic dynamics suffer too much state patronage, auspices, intervention or impediment for long. rules of capitalism cannot brook playing favorites (**).

the first part of the second implication is that the akp and its hand-fed capitalist section may soon (***) have an oedipal fall out.

the second part of the second implication is that the akp's economic policies, unless the party is going to vanish into political vapor shortly, have to be autophagic (***) - they have to be self-devouring. they have to relinquish their hold over their protéges and aggree to being controlled by them. their alternative is going down the same way hardline islamist erbakan and co. did, into obligatory oblivion. if the akp succeeds such a gargantuan paradigm shift from religious piousness to conservative capitalism though, it can set itself free... just as a cunning fox chews away its caught limb from a trap... or a starving octopus feeds on one of its own legs...

hmmmm... implication three:

it all comes back to the same point on the vicious circle: tayyib effendi & co. & rosy are not philosophically, therefore mentally, therefore technically equipped to enact such a major transformation.

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(*) i use technology rather looosely here, to cover all acts - not necessarily technical or mechanical - that make life easier and more enjoyable; or in practical terms, turn production as well as consumption into a meaningful source of fun, for deriving the best value out of time. therefore, a fine movie, an excellent painting, a good idea etc. are all a part of living-life-technology.
(**) indeed, there are signs leaking from the traditional economic giants of turkey, traditionally always watched over "paternally" by the state, that they do not much approve of the government's favoritism toward the "green" capital. they are apprehensive that the religiously oriented government is in a process of creating its own bourgeoisie, just as they were raised by the secularist state at one time. want an indicator? a major holding has sponsored an art show endorsing optimism! optimism is usually required at times of uncertainty, with the bad looming on most of the horizon. jjust ask who feels pessimistic in turkish society today?
(***) self eating
(****) sociologically soon... five years? 10? probably not 20...

the missionary position

2007-09-21T15:23:00.000+03:00

only thus far the ship skippered by tayyib effendi could fare into the uncharted oceans of freedom and liberty.

adopting the missionary position in politicking, tayyib & co. & rosy forfeited their capacity to institute that aura of legitimacy encompassing all elements in the community, which is the binding cement of social unity. only in that aura can a society experience cohesion in concord, dissent and resultant diversity that constitutes its dynamism (see blog of aug 13, 07).

tayyib & co. & rosy's 47 percent electoral victory was an acknowledgement that they could be accepted as legitimate governors of the whole nation. the vote, in spite of the strong surge of opposition that is now solidly entrenched in one third of the nation, gave them license to end the bureaucratic stranglehold over the society, to set it free from impediments that functioned to divide the people. it empowered tayyib & co. to write the new social contract, to instate the new parameters of legitimacy embraced by all.

instead, they dropped into the missionary position, and once again attempted to foist their own religiously colored agenda as the priority of the entire society.

the country desperately needed the remedies that a new constitution, i.e., the new social contract could bring. the right political cadres could turn it into a catapult that could launch turkey into a far better epoch; were the totality of the society paid due respect. instead, tayyib & co. & rosy hinged their priority on their obsession to cover women, or the dubious liberty of women to cover themselves up.

covering-up is an obvious ban! it restricts women's appearance and behavior. it restrains their birth rights to determine how to use their own bodies, for the service of men; so that men will not sin! this is an insult to women because it reduces them solely to objects of sexual desire for men. it also humiliates men, who materialize as creatures that cannot tame or civilize their meanest instincts in the presence of minimal stimulation. so, tayyib & co. & rosy, in their missionary position, have devoted their energy to elevating a ban that naturally demeans and subordinates the human race, both woman and man, to the eminence of a liberty!

tayyib & co. & rosy launched their campaign to liberate through carceration because that is the extent of their understanding and sense of freedom... because they feel emancipated as they surrender (*). they strive to cover, conceal and control; instead of open and make transparent, emancipate... they try to confine and contain, instead of release and liberate. therefore, they attempt to represent the covering up of women as a freedom, rather than making sure that nobody persecutes (and certainly does not prosecute) any woman for un-covering and baring her body. they cannot bring themselves to accept the universal recognition that the body is essentially a private domain and not a matter of public intervention (**).

the problem is not that simple, though. in their recalcitrant resistance to modernity (***) tayyib & co. and rosy are so engrossed with problems long solved by the modern world in the 18th and 19th centuries that, they are philosophically too retarded to realize that the uniformity they are keen to impose in the name of religious freedom is a straitjacket that restrains the heterogeneity of a modern society; strangles its life-lines of culture and thought. faiths, and all of them simultaneously, are only one color in the hue of social multiplicity. prioritizing any religion just turns plurality into a monochrome; causes the hue to turn gray.

what about the 47 percent electoral victory? oh, do not trust the public vote; it is a fickle mistress, at best! at least one fourth of it was loaned to tayyib effendi & co & rosy, because it was obvious the rest of the political machine was in a state of utter hebetude as far as creative society management was concerned and had no answers to give to any question, including how and why their sole bastion, secularity was to be protected. that minimum 10 percent was a credit extended to tayyib & co. & rosy to unite the country around a basic legitimacy, without conceding from cohesion in concord, dissent and diversity. they were not accredited to assume the missionary position and pursue their conventions from yesteryears.

tayyib effendi &. co. & rosy failed grossly. they failed within 60 days of their electoral victory. with them, the turkish society failed; look at what is happening: a superior court considers birth control pills in a wife's purse as evidence of adultery and lessens the sentence of the husband who killed her... a nitwit folk singer and a dimwit "poet" praise the murder of hrant dink in an extremely stupid but dangerously racist song... more examples abound but not now, wait for another post...

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(*) "islam" means surrender.
(**) that is why, in civilized communities, even in the bible belt, exposure of one's body is usually a misdemaneor only. and civilization began aeons ago, with the recognition of habeas corpus, "having a body".
(***) to modernity, as a way of mind (culture) not to modernization which is more limited to enjoying the fruits, especially techno-mechanical fruits of modernity.

virtue of asses

2007-09-20T21:29:00.000+03:00

the following are excerpts from a research proposal (*), written by the blogger in the early years after the collapse of the soviet regime.

“the end of the cold war has not signified the termination of conflicts but rather caused a shift in heretofore well known objects, objectives and borders of conflict ... the “new” conflict, which although it actually was always there, was shadowed by the controversy between the west and the east, is the one between modernity, with all the material, practical, social, political and psychological values ... and the non-modern world for which the fruits of modernity are not easily accessible or acceptable and therefore, sometimes an anathema.”

“the border along which ( the conflict) materializes has moved to what was formerly the southeastern flank of the (nato) alliance. of the postmodern threats classified by nato, terrorism and fundamentalism are rooted and nourished in the middle east... (migration and environmental deterioration are not problems foreign to the near east either). terrorism ... is used unscrupulously as a political means by the states in the region and iran is openly an exporter of fundamental islam, as well as a quite probable sponsor of political violence. in short, the eastern and southern frontiers of turkey, in a sense, is the physical boundary between modernity and non-modernity.

[and from another contemporary paper: ... “(terrorism), this “world wide war” thrives in the historical fault line along the schism between modernity and nonmodern modes of existence, easily recognized in a propensity for seeing violence as a solution to problems at any level, from the international to the familial and the personal”...]

... “the empire of evil has toppled to reveal a boiling cauldron of evil, to the east and south of the anatolian peninsula... this borderline of imminent threat to the west, or the western style of life, which now includes former soviet bloc societies as well, is practically extended on an axis that begins from the caucasus, reaching as far as the ionian islands ...”

and the following are passages from an article by robert kagan in the sunday times (**). mr. kagan is a senior associate at the carnegie endowment for international peace and transatlantic fellow at the german marshall fund.

… “the years immediately after the end of the cold war offered a tantalising glimpse of a new kind of international order, the hope that nations might grow together or disappear altogether, with ideological conflicts melting away, and cultures intermingling through free commerce and communications. that, however, was a mirage…”

… “it is a time not of convergence but of divergence of ideas and ideologies ... the old competition between liberalism and absolutism has reemerged, with the nations of the world increasingly lining up between them or along the fault line of tradition and modernity – islamic fundamentalism against the west...”

… “the islamists’ struggle against the powerful and often impersonal forces of modernisation, capitalism and globalisation is a significant fact of life in the world today, but oddly this struggle between modernisation and traditionalism is largely a sideshow on the international stage. the future is more likely to be dominated by the ideological struggle among the great powers than by the effort of radical islamists to restore an imagined past of piety … the enduring ideological conflict since the enlightenment has been the battle between liberalism and autocracy”...

back to my nato paper, further elaborating on the relationship of modernity and security:

… “(modern west moving toward) an organic functional integration or, as popularly called, globalization... a structural incorporation into the forming organism means taking part in the shaping of the “better” world; of being able to determine for (one)self. the inner core of global security in the near future, is likely to be based on a world that is predictable, controllable, manageable and therefore safe and therefore free, i.e.; where no setbacks on the rule of modern democracy and economic liberalism are necessary or tolerated. this world (of modernity) is one that can expect growth in every aspect of life in geometric proportions”...

then, about islam (religion), democracy and modernity, from another paper:

... “modernity is a uniquely eurogenic phenomenon. it corresponds to the progress of capitalism as a world system and the evolution of a modern geoculture (cf. immanuel wallerstein) i.e., a typical way of mind and life (***), shared values and praxes around more or less homogeneous social, political, economic and psychological structures. the singular "controversy" of essence in the history of (at least) the last five centuries is being or not being modern. along this dichotomy, religion plays a determining role only in relation to and to the extent of its influence on the processes of modernity in any society ..."

oh no, no, no no!!!!

i have not grown complacent, i am not bragging, i am not being vain, i am not jealous, i am not angry and i am not polishing my manure!

i am just laying the grounds so i can demand a hearing ear for what i am going to say in the near future. i guess i have a right to, if long-titled international fellows can only now see or dare speak out what was obvious to me a decade ago.

if that is rodomontade... big deal! the brits used to say modesty is the virtue of asses.

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(*) presented to nato, however not evaluated because it lacked the “hard (physical) science” component required. the project foresaw the extension of western security along a caucasian – ionian axis involving greece, turkey and armenia, through political moderation and mediation, aided by science. it may be worthwhile to remind readers that in those days, “war” was a rhetorical standard between ankara and athens and turkey was chastising the pro-islamic confectionary maker ülker for selling chocolates and biscuits to armenia! prof. burcu bostanoğlu of the gazi university in ankara was my partner in crime…

me? i was, at the time, a humble and happy skipper of pleasure boats in the mediterranean when I was not writing ambitious papers…
(**) september 2, 2007
(***) it is exrapolated in the paper, with elaborate references to wallerstein's "the end of what modernity?" that capitalism involves both economic and political - social freedom and liberalization.

pavarotti

2007-09-09T14:12:00.001+03:00

music is the ultimate in human thought because it is where emotion, in its purest, blends with and becomes reason in its most unadulterated: mathematics... music is also quantum physics experienced, for forever, music is the edge of life, a whole, single moment and place epitomized in sound... existence as absolute! undiluted dasein!

thank you, luciano, for a lifetime of absolute life.

hats off to stoner but rossi is still great

2007-09-02T15:40:00.000+03:00

i loved the little aussie from the first. casey "crasher" stoner always looked to me as a very talented, brainy and bold fellow, with a heart, as the turks say, "as large as a hearth" (*). maybe that braveness earned him the monicker "crasher" but he is obviously better on two wheels as he is in falling off them.

now, unless the sky drops off, casey stoner is the virtual champion of the motorcycle grand prix, or the moto-gp, the greatest event in motorcycling, for 2007. there still are more races to go but the all-time-grand-champion of the hearts, the "doctor", the "mozart of motorcycle" the great valentino rossi who has elevated riding into a visual art, has already caved in, when his yamaha developed transmission trouble this sunday.

i hope that before he retires, hopefully not before some decades later, rossi will recall his pep and bring his art back to the top of the podium. after all, last year he lost to a mediocre american from kentucky because of a machine that kept failing him and ultimately destroying his morale. this year, he lost first to the excellent and frighteningly fast (**) new ducati and than to casey from down under.

i am a fan of stoner, all right, but without the soul that rossi (whom i prefer to all riders out there), and old timers like max biaggi, alex barros, loris capirossi, marco melandri, john "hopper" hopkins etc. bring to the events, watching bike racing will soon become like looking at a porno movie where japanese robots make love in the finnish language.

it is my hope that the fighting spirit that comes with a sly smile in stoner will, as of next year develop into an inimitable style that can mark his deed and keep the art within the trade.

so, congratulations to the winner, he is a crash!

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(*) americans would take the expression downward into the ball-park...
(**) doing better than 20 kliks faster than rossi's yamaha.

s(h)itting at home!

2007-09-02T14:16:00.000+03:00

ertuğrul günay has never been on my list of comment-worthy politicians. to me, he has always been like another hundred billion unbeknownst public servants, only mediocre - no insult meant, with the quality of material available, if i had commented on him, i'd probably have slapped him around like a wet rag. still, by my book, mediocre fares worse than bad...

now i am giving günay a chance for public maturity after years of political adolescence. as minister of culture - which, in turkey, is essentially an oxymoron -, i read his first declaration that he goes mad whenever he sees concrete slabs "grinning like decayed teeth in a mouth", obstructing what remains of seven millennia of history all around the country.

i don't know what he can do about it, or what can be done about it - just recently an antwerper told me that bodrum has no character as a city, it is just a collection of cubic slabs. actually, it has become an ugly collection of white slabs in only the last 20 years; the bodrum of 1985 looked slightly different from the bodrum of 1885, and even for my calloused soul, it was an exciting sight, sailing back to home port from some of the most beautiful cruising grounds in the world.

in two years, marked with the stamp of turgut özal's "money and gains before all" philosophy, the entire old town, consisting at least 75 percent of houses built in the 19th century or before the republic (*), was torn down practically in a fortnight, and rebuilt according to the current templates of temples of terribly pedestrian taste. in worst cases, those character-free cubic hovels surrounded and smothered what could not be brought down of the old stone buildings.

disrespect, the peasantly disdain for history and culture were so suddenly released from long suppressed depths of sick souls of the intellectually oppressed that brazen authorities, despite "strict" laws against building on historical remains, could permit a supermarket chain (now acquired by carrefour) to display a six-seven thousand years old rock tomb inside, along and among their stands! it is still there but even shoppers are not aware of what stands next to macaroni or raki.

bodrum's natives, too, were the first to demolish their hundred-year-old family abodes. after 1989, the "populist" mayor overlooked any and all restrictions in the statutes that protected the old town. by 1990, bodrum looked like a shanty town, built overnight somewhere in deep africa, when some lucky dude struck oil.

a couple years later, during an informal meeting, i complained about the devastation of all those beautiful, historic and historical buildings, which, nowadays, grin at you like a reverie from a full mouth of architectural decayed teeth, the wife of a mayor said "well, they were not comfortable at all. we had to go to the garden and relieve ourselves in outhouses".

you see why günay's job is like don quijote's mission against windmills? people don't mind giants, it is the windmills they want felled...

that is why they s(h)it down, in air conditioned, cinderblock, whitewahsed, ugly, expensive shacks that have bathrooms under their roofs, instead of out-houses.

instead of houses to live in and love...

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(*) i must note that "old" is not necessarily synonymous with beautiful or good. but aesthetically, bodrum until 1985 was a sight for sore eyes indeed. it represented a historically proven solution to accomodate nature in culture that was monumentalized in stone-craft architecture. i searched for old photos on google but could not find any.
(**) except where it pertained to myths of military conquests that had concluded 400 years ago to be followed by an endless procession of humiliating defeats, and sycophantic, hypocritical idolatry of anything remotely religious as "islamic heritage"...

a new covenant from the quorum

2007-08-13T12:54:00.000+03:00

i said after the polls that turkey's future now rests with the ability of tayyib efendi & co. in working out a new "covenant", a social contract, that enables turks, who have become absolutely unqualified to live together as a "society", to reestablish the media of coexistence again.

that requires an intellectual acumen and faculty which obviously surpasses the ken of tayyib efendi & co., whose cerebral acuity is mainly honed by islam. however, the legitimacy they have harvested in the elections can only be turned into real political power if they can re-write the rule book of cohesion and diversity.

yes, certainly power writes its own truth; but if the rule book is to be convincing, applicable and workable, it has to be universally functional rather than local, regional, even national or otherwise parochial.

for a basically rural population that has resettled in urban surroundings and modified it to its taste physically,psychicallly and ethically, universality is hardly a priority. furthermore, whether they have a feel for its utility or not, the political cadres of such popular/ist movements as the akp are rarely accoutered themselves to administer and cope with a cognitive innovation that cannot be grasped by practice alone but requires a philosophical gestalt of knowledge and action.

paradoxically however, tayyib efendi & co. are better positioned than almost any modernizer in turkish history to lead a gradually modernizing and geographically urbanizing nation accross that rubicon: first, because the 47 percent poll victory does not give the akp any license to do what they were feared they would do. that leaves them to wear the universal armor of "westernization" for their own "protection". second, they must have realized that while they may keep the outside of their heads islamically geared, keeping time to the universal tango inside, brings more kudos. third, "they" (and relatively, turks) are indeed getting richer; and the hedonism that is the hallmark of richness, simply gets smothered by parochialism - look at the saudi youth finally launching their kind of a "protest" movement. fourth, tayyib efendi & co. are pragmatists enough to realize that their success at the ballot box owes more to the pro -eu policies they adopted in the first three years than abdullah gül's ouster-by-direct-order from the presidential race or the quasi-religious show of nationalism they tried to replace their slackening eu drive with. the eu, after all, is a milestone on the eternal course of universality.

"writing" a social covenant is quite different from writing and passinng a new constitution - you do not do it with your pen, you do it with your life. it is tough because when lives cannot meet and merge in legitimacy, they eventually jeopardize each other. that is why, only in the last week there were more than one "drunken driving caused deaths" reported in the peapers per day. that is why a poor rich not so little fashion model was put in prison, while a mother was murdered by her son after a family sanction. that is also why we have dried up, after very parochially, stealing from our own nature the lakes, wetlands, swamps, moors etc. to turn them into fields, hotels, factories and even universities.

a universal life code cannot brook privilege or exception or stupidity, that have become the aggregate root cause of the anomie that is consuming turkey.

and tayyib efendi & co. are the only campaigners, brave, powerful yet still desparate enough to seek and discover the order within chaos, to serve everyone. the polity quorum (*) they command is not complacent enough to refuse seeking assistance from opinion makers outside their turf, at home and in the world.

after all, tayyib efendi & co. set forth with the ambition of making islam an organic component of the dominant world-culture, what better chance can they expect to have than write its universal tenets into a life-saving covenant of coexistence?

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(*) a polity quorum consists of the designers, deciders, advocates, implementers, alternatives, critics and opponents of policy, active in the fields of politics, academe, arts, media-communications, industry, finance, commerce and the clergy. it exercises its potency, among other matters, on the structures and contents of communication and , even when not directly involved in that trade, can function as a body of "communication elites" by means of its global social influence. a polity quorum tends to establish itself as the david that can slay any goliath threatening society. the polity quorum can sway the representations of truth to its will with recourse to the power of discourse by which it tacitly provides the public with templates of thought and political action.

and if they fail? too many unneccessary but inevitable deaths later, just as was the case in the wild west, the wild east of the third and a half world will also settle its frontier rules. or the frontier will settle its rules.

state of thick headedness

2007-08-12T12:20:00.000+03:00

practice what you preach?

according to turkish law, every person who rides a bike is supposed to wear appropriate head protection gear. from time to time, as almost every other law in turkey, that rule is put into effect by our esteemed police officers.

since the norm is not normally enforced, the normal thing to do in summer is not to wear a helmet (*).

so once or twice each summer, the police stop and ban from traffic thousands of riders, also booosting the state budget with the huge amount of fines they issue.

the next day, normal becomes normal again, the norm is shelved again, and the police can't give a damn whether you wear a scarf or the greener half of a water melon on your head while riding. till the next shake down...

you know who does part of the stopping, helmet-checking and writing tickets?

who else? the very motorcycle-mounted specialized traffic police of the state of the republic of turkey, of course.

the point is, those guys themselves do not and are not required to wear helmets or serious protective gear in summer either!

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(*)although turks are angry when you suggest that so long as they do not need to protect it, their heads may be thicker than hot asphalt, they continue to assume high temperatures add extra resistance to their skull.

public enemy on two wheels

2007-08-12T12:11:00.000+03:00

i wrote a post in türkiş garfucius about turks smoking and talking on the phone at the same time, while riding a motorbike - naturally, this should go as a follow-up in turkish but i do feel a responsibility to warn the unwary world public against the extent of the threat my countrymen are capable of posing (as to turks who cannot read english, they'll either hear it from me or somebody else, guess it or be the very threat themselves - in any case, they are used to live with turks and their turkishnesses as they still find it necessary to pro(per?)secute those who supposedly insult "turkishness").

yesterday evening, long before any legitimate time for raki, i saw a man lighting a cigarette
while riding with his phone to his ear!.. i stopped to watch, expecting him to fall but probably because something happened with his cell phone only yards from a turn, he parked, fixed the wrong and started talking again. i rode away.

preposterous pagans in muslim prayer

2007-08-03T22:46:00.000+03:00

in one of kurt vonnegut's novels, the hero, malachi constant, wallowing through a river viscous with industrial effluent, reached the conclusion that if god allowed nature to be so violated, he could not be caring less about his creation. "i am not a(n environmental) conservationist any more," constant said, "because god himself is not".

i watched in the news last evening thousands of people gather to pray for rain. that collective defiance of reason and common sense was further aggravated because the prayer was official! the istanbul mufti's bureau (probably corresponds to a bishopry) decided that since thousands of citizens desired so, the prayers could be held under official sanction.

there was more to the farce! the national directorate of religious affairs approved and endorsed the mufti's decision. so within 10 days of tayyib effendi & co.'s electoral victory, approaching the second decade of the 21st century, the secular muslim turkish state became complicit in a metaphysical travesty of science and rationality.

three centuries after descartes, in modern turkey hoping to become integrated with cartesian europe, a solution to draught which is the direct outcome of utter human stupidity and lack of mathematical reasoning, was sought in supplication to divine providence.

turkey never was water-rich and the quality of its water reserves was only mediocre. it had to preserve, protect and improve its water as a matter of politics if it were to be admitted to the eu. i harp on the "political" with intent, because unless it has a political repercussion, nothing in the third-and-a-half world is of import. don't believe me? listen to the ruckus over the draught - you'd think it was the eve of the second world war, everyone blaming the other for negligence. let's make it clear that the current deterioration in our entire environment is a national success story. what else can be said in a society where parties do not even bother to pay lip service to environment where 85 percent of the populace smokes a pack of cigarettes per day? it needs far deeper a vision to care about resource economy!

turkey's most popular-ever-politician suleyman demirel first boasted, then apologized for having desiccated 95 percent of the country's wetlands. the state water works, malaria control center, the road, water and electricitiy authority etc., all contributed to the disappearance of myriad streams, both above and under the ground.

lakes were dried to turn into construction sites or agrarian areas. cities polluted any body of water, stagnant or in flux, with their excrement and effluent. the seas got their share of the filth, and until people could not find the water to brush their teeth with, their worth as fresh water sources was totally ignored.

we burnt away our forests. more than the forests we lost to fires, we donated to our enterpreneurial classes and their foreign partners so they could build hotels, other touristic installations, recently, water guzzling golf courses, car factories - even universities!..

every marshland or swamp was dried by planting eucalyptus trees that are as thirsty as sponges.

we washed our precious cars till their paint came off, we watered the streets so that cars and other vehicles could slide dangerously in the resultant mud, we lost water through bad plumbing etc., etc., etc.!

so much irresponsibility, so ubiqutious idiocy and now what do you expect but such official irrationality?

i noticed that some of the muslims praying for rain were replicating drops falling, shaking their fingers downward, as if in palsy. that is a pagan ritual. psychologically, such acts represent an archetype that indicates the individual's urge to achieve his/her object of desire through identification with it. but religiously, it is anti-islamic, anti-monotheistic, it is blasphemy!

thus, in effect, the "modernist", secular muslim turkish state is officially sanctioning and assigning its mufti and clergy to conduct blasphemous pagan rituals which it finances out of its budget!

draught, by proxy of famine is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. had he lived to see these days, would apostle st. john the theologian have added preposterousness? (*)

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(*) preposterous in latin corresponds roughly to "ass over head"

note: i am not (particularly) against religion or prayer, even pagan versions. my objection here is to the state, accepted as the epitome of rationality in the hegelian to weberian tradition, funding and sponsoring a religious ritual held for obviously unscientific, irrational and futile ends.
then, i too, can demand at least that the state pay for (good red) wine that we propose to consume in a drinking orgy to anger teetotaling pagan gods who will send down their wrath in the form of rain . we may also please the dionyssiac deities, who may deign to rain water on us as a blessing. who can say this proposal is more or less viable or effective than praying for rain?

garfucius questioneth

2007-08-03T22:13:00.000+03:00

garfucius asketh blasphemously:

how possible is it, not to be proud of being a member of the race of humans who can simultaneously smoke a cigarette and talk on a mobile phone, while riding a motorcycle without a helmet or other protection?

hast the lord bidden that the cranium of that race thicken with the summer heat?

alas, at which stage of evolution does the brain become an accessory only?

america will save europe again

2007-08-03T21:34:00.000+03:00

summer laze, i'm just browsing the news if i feel like it, rather than become interested in it. the best pieces that caught my attention in the last two days are about gordon brown's visit to dubya.

i've read that gordon's not going to be dubya's poodle, as his predecessor was (supposed to be). he is not smiling at dubya as much as the one who preceded him did. he is giving back great britain its dignity that it is busy losing in the cesspool of contemporary politics that's called iraq.

lord! how great america really is and how patheticallly small and ineffete its bickering and bitching allies this side of the atlantic!

look at the world, america has long hit the lowest ebb of its popularity in history, much worse than viet nam, where it had at least the filmsy alibi of fighting to free humanity from the evil of communism.

look at the world, look at 500-odd years of modern history pioneered by europe. look at all the ideals held so much in esteem, all originating from the european experience and interpretation of life. look at europe, the fount of philosophy and ideas.

look how poorly an influence europe has on the world, in spite of all that intellectual treasure!

look how meek merkel is, how sardonically vacant sarkozy, how insidiously they are undermining each other to the extra joy of the poodle and now gordon, while how negligibly, as far as the world is concerned, the others are going about their businesses.

like it or not, coca cola is obviously more effective than karl marx, britney spears more guiding than j. p. sartre (if anyone remembers him); everybody knows what a humvee is, nobody recognizes hamlet any more!..

america is great because it has built the world in every corner of which it can exist, at least as an enemy. europe is shrinking smaller and smaller because it refuses to live in any world but its own!

look at europe with its grand history being laid to waste by the likes of merkel or sarkozy who are as alien to its essence as a texan cowboy. look at its ignorance of itself and its obligation, its responsibility to the mental and experiential commonwealth of the human race.

look at a giant drowning in its own feces because it has grown too lethargic to move.

dubya gave the brit pm, the new non-poodle one, a leather fighter pilot's jacket as a present - which he wore with a frown.

don't worry, america will be coming back to save europe of itself, too. not long till it saves itself from dubya and his heritage of evil.

marmara, the pit-island of near future

2007-07-30T13:30:00.000+03:00

please forgive me. it is already the end of july and i am still supposed to write about marmara island. even hürriyet beat me to it.

i have a meager excuse. before/during/in the aftermath of the elections, i concentrated on my turkish blog. see today's other post in english, if you are interested in a precis of what i wrote.

in today’s hürriyet, the marmara island was represented as “oases of peace amidst olive orchards” (*). that is a fairly accurate description – “fairly” because, although the island is comely and relatively well covered with green, the western part is sliced off like a chunk from a block of white (feta, if you are more familiar with the greek version) cheese. “marmara” means “marble” and the stone from the island’s quarries has adorned architectural masterpieces the world around since time immemorable.

however, although marble was mined in marmara since time immemorable, the island was still whole (as i used to sail past) in the early 80s. nowadays, at least 10 percent of the mountainous bulk that juts out of the marmara sea is gone! shaved off!

either there have been built too many architectural masterpieces since turks have learned to trade, or we had too little of an island to start with. heavens willing, in 20 more years, we’ll have left none save a flat pit (**). so, go and visit while it is still there.

unless you want to acquaint yourself at first glance with the sorry sight of an amputated island, avoid the northern part, especially saraylı, which unfortunately, is one of the main ports of arrival and marble export. a ferry leaves from barbaros village near the town of tekirdağ and about two hours later, drops you amidst an armory of the kitsch-est sculptory you can ever find; or the worst way to exploit marble or an insult to even post-modernistic pretenses to art (i did not know before how an insult could be insulted!). maybe some 100 statues competing in absolute lack of taste and proportion, lining the town’s harbor and its welcome way, add insult to the injury of nature and urge you to flee. thank goodness, the ferry home does not leave immediately, and the urge pushes you toward other parts of the island instead.

on the way to the center situated on the south side, which is again called marmara, lie the nice little villages that give the island its true charm. in smaller villages like asmalı (vineyard-full), beautiful with what remains of its ottoman and greek architecture, or gündoğdu (sunrising), just 4-5 kliks east from marmara, there are too few accomodations, if any.

marmara itself is of indifferent beauty, not too inviting for some now that most of its historical stone and wood houses have been torn down to be replaced with uniformly ugly, precarious looking, bizarrely colored concrete slabs, 4-5 storeys high. however, it retains some appeal, with huge, historic maple trees that create a real thick canopy of shade, sea side cafés that are cool, offer hearty service and charge funny tabs, passable hotels and by local standards, good restaurants. but if you want to get out of even a small town as marmara, 15 minutes away northwest in çınarlı or manastır, the much, much nicer little cove near çınarlı, where the remains of a monastery can barely be discerned if you search hard, are one or two motels which cater to the day trade as well. we parked at the first one (***) in manastır, where, blissfully, for a change from the ubiqutious, inevitable, unbearable but unescapable moanings in turkish that pass for music (even worse than postmodernistic anything), and seem to be as obligatory in the public entertainment industry as military service, was playing a tolerable melange of light classics, pop jazz and bubble gum rock at a survivable volume.

don’t try to convince anyone in turkey, unless you look menacing enough or rich enough to bribe or tip over generously, that waves beating on sand or rock is an incomparably finer sound.

food-wise, do not expect anything great. seafood is quite ok, also fresh but summer is not the time big fishing boats are out there, so prices may be a bit stiff – better stick to “midye”, (mussels) fried or stuffed. they tend to fry midye with a bit too much flour, making it taste like börek but you can warn the cook. octopus, i did not come accross and calamari are imported - though one time we consumed locally caught stuff. greenery and herbs are fresh and tasty. i never eat meat or poultry so find that out for yourself. my impression is that, prices are pretty cheap, compared to istanbul and bodrum (big deal! turkey's most expensive villages!).

you can reach marmara island by ferry either from barbaros (to saraylı or çınarlı) or from erdek (to marmara), just 10 kliks from bandırma, where the fast ferry from yenikapı - istanbul drops you. ankara or izmir have to use erdek. a slow ferry (still, she does 14 knots and takes 6-8 hours to get there) also leaves from sarayburnu (down from the topkapı palace) on rather unreliable schedules but summer tariffs are more reasonable until september. another possibility is taking a ferry from silivri, an hour from istanbul, to terrible avşa and from there to marmara as a last resort. avşa is about a half hour by ferry from marmara, erdek another two hours or so.

otherwise, do not, repeat, don’t, repeat “again”, do not, no, no, no, do not go to avşa!..
it is bald, it is crowded, it is a monument to pedestrian poor taste and it is even noisier than noisiville, bodrum. the much flattered avşa wine, too, is usually mediocre and cheaper in big towns. however, as the man said in woodstock, “brown’s no good but it’s your own trip”...

although for decades i have ridden or driven ships around marmara island, i had never visited it. i found it go-able-again, except for saraylı. i had been to avşa and just one glance from the docked ferry reaffirmed my firm decision never to set foot there.

note for bikers:
if you are traveling on two wheels, the roads on the island are fairly paved but the physical road structure is uneven. you must not trust the right side of the road, which slants at 20 degrees or more toward the dubious berm. it looks like it may give way under your front. use the center of the way but keep in mind that the oncoming traffic, including trucks hauling slabs of marble, will be inclined to do the same. now, the other danger comes into play: ok, the surface paving is gravel-cemented-with-tar, tar melts under the sun and becomes a sticky, slippery blot on the road. in case of oncoming traffic, dropping right-ward 20 centimeters to another level of your part of the road, where more loose gravel also tends to collect, requires extra caution. do not ride fast if you do not want tar stains on your beloved beast, either.

i did not challenge the northt-to-east-to south coastal road from saraylı to topağaç while two-on because it was under repair and pure gravel. we made the trip in june. enduros or enduro tourers might just wish to do that.

by the way, riding, you come accross specimens of wild life ogling you like foxes or owls and very frequently, rabbits. then, some wild life creeps away or toward you, turtles, for instance, or snakes! they are the harmless variety, more afraid of you than you are of them. so do not risk kissing the slippery melted tar, trying to run over and kill them.

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(*) afraid my translation sounds better and more romantic than the original headline, folks.
(**) ok, laugh at the idea of a “flat pit” and underestimate turkish ingeniuty. we dug 40-years’-worth of poor quality lignite from a 100-meter-deep-pit-few-square-kilometers-wide in yatagan, destroying most of 40-centuries-old stratonichae, which used to be, for the ancient world, about what chicago is to the modern one. we’ll dig the marmara island 100 – 200 meters deep below sea level, leaving just a rim around so it won’t flood. just give us 20-more-years’-stock-of- marble... i wager, the bottom of the pit will be flatter than the one in yatagan.
(***) actually, it was the end of the road and we did have to park there but you can walk to the competition next door through the first one. it is not considered tresspassing apparently.

court confused too? the holy sepulchre of abashed law

2007-06-30T11:29:00.000+03:00

all right, as long as i am here, i'd better put down this note:

i am confuused, as apparenntly every other soul who heard it is, over the court of constitution' s newwly published rationale in annullling the presidential elections in parliament.

the court's absolutely but bashfully "political" ruling assumes "compromise" (*), a totally nonexistent requirement, to forever have been haunting the spirit of the constitution, like a holy sepulchre, although it appeares nowhere in the text. the court guess-timates that the lawmakers of the military required the 367 votes (out of 550) to begin voting but not necessarily to finish the vote...

imagine... you have mr. abc on whose candidacy you agree with 367 votes, but then something happens and consenting partties begin a feud... then comes the third vote and mr. abc is elected with just a bare majority while the innter-party wars go on... where's the compromise?

actually, the only case the 367 condition can arithmeticallly be met is if two or more parties run a close race supporting two or more candidates on a parallel course, seldom if ever, reaching the election quorum, eventually, most possibly sabotaging the parliament.

hmmm... sepulchral legal mathematics is a bit heavy on this lazy day... i can only calculate up to third and a half...

excuses and ...

2007-06-30T11:13:00.000+03:00

sorry i procrastinated the posts on marmara island and edirne. i am inordinately full (not busy, really, just full!) and cannot seem to make time for my "pleasures". i am also moving out of the apartment on the bosphorus, just accross from topkapı palace and the princes' islands further away; that surely saps one's good moods.

as always in moments of depression, the right cure is a healthy dose of the aegean. i am going to bodrum soon, for the summer at least. i can sit at the balcony, watching the shadow of the castle on the water as yachts cruise by.

i certainly will not miss istanbul: everythhing that is bad here flocks there for the holidays, plus the insufferable noise from all those seaside clubs and our pride: the catamaran disco, the tin can of rackets, the only vessel i'll be happy to see sunken...

so if i have not been able to write, i have excuses...

of the other component completing the expression, well we have... galore!

culturicide

2007-06-25T12:56:00.000+03:00

i have been running away on weekends recently. once i visited edirne, another time i took a ferry from tekirdağ to the marmara island, elafonissos (deers' island) or prokonissos (amphora island), originally.

i will try to give some information about both but before that, allow me to make an observation that causes my skin to crawl: anywhere i go, including parts of istanbul, everything that is a) not created by god; b) built after 1950 or so; is absolutely an eyesore, a monument to absolute lack of taste, a bloody handed testimony to culturicide!

culturicide? just a couple days ago, an ancient harbor was reproted discovered during the construction of a tunnel for the subterranean train in yenikapı, with remains of byzantine boats and othre archaelogical artefacts. true to type, the finds will be collected and taken to the museum and the construction of the tunnel will continue as planned, apparently, over the ruins of the antique harbor.

all right, on a hot day, this much annoying news is enough, we all know we are living in the third and a half world.

let's get to the island now...

are only idiots surprised?

2007-06-13T13:12:00.000+03:00

running turkey even as smoothly as a farm tractor is noticeably beyond the ken of tayyib effendi & co. so far, whatever accomplishment they can claim to their name is authored (*) not by their political acumen, but a short lived good sense to listen to common sense: the still dubious recovery in economy is due to a "sufficiently" strict compliance with imf recipes. the political "reforms", which, to many in the country are an anathema that has left turkey in the bosom of terrorism and hostile forces; is the dictate of europe.

that leaves the balance sheet of tayyib effendi & co. in great debit. the last six-seven months have passed in constant tension, caused by the akp's resurrected political-islamic tendencies, which have incrementally gained precedence in their style of government and has tainted the presidential elections as well. i am not blaming the akp for getting publicly (and electronically) rebuked by the army and slapped with the threat of a putsch but i am blaming them for not foreseeing the crisis, making the right moves to prevent it so that they could be strengthened with enough public support to resist (**) an intervention in the democratic process. instead, now they have become more obedient to the soldiery, while becoming more malevolent toward those who are not their political kins.

they grossly flunked the test in political aptitude.

the akp's mentality and mental stretch are terribly beneath the required minimum to administer a country like turkey; a fact obvious in the all-over decrepitude. beyond the "higher-up" affairs of state (which are in shambles anyway), the day-to-day management of the society has degenerated in a fashion that will take generations to repair. the stitches that hold together the social fabric have mostly come undone.

the belief in the possibility of a collective and universal legitimacy is the psychological mortar that keeps the society together. for at least a decade in turkey, the society's sense of legitimacy has multifurcated, with each splinter adhering to its own description. the scenes of corruption that resulted from that fragmentation were elemental in elevating the akp to power in 2002. however, since then, the only social reference of the akp proved still to be religion; and religion cannot suffice in keeping a complex, multi-faceted community as a going concern. when no intellectual or psychical orthodoxy could be devised to rally around, the societal mortar became too loose, too grainy to bind the public.

nobody in turkey (unless well connected) has any faith in law, its enforcement or its equal application to all. social norms are disregarded to the point of ridicule. everyone is ready to enforce his/her own rules on another by any means, very often not legal; because legality is not a consideration. morality is largely defunct, immorality is efficacious and proportionately rife. the end result is a pervasive and burgeoning anomie. the society has lost its benchmarks of fair play, because it has lost all measure of "normal" (***); which is the medium of social life.

the author-ity which derives its power from its representative status is helpless or, worse, apathetic to the plight of society. in any case, it therefore lacks the quality of being representative! in the past, there have been governments whose status was challenged, as is the current one, but even the most violently opposing social forces could hardly open their legitimacy to state for debate. the akp, due to its - apparently not unjustified - deficient confidence in its own capability and capacity, forfeited if not all, most claim to that legitimacy.

because of that overstretched capacity and the toil it extracted from the society's schemata of legitimacy, robbers and thieves galore on the streets; communal order is smothered by ubiqutious confusion; as can be observed in the brazen transgression of traffic laws (or any other law, for that matter) to which even dogs learn to obey; any stranger you talk to may pull a gun and shoot you if he does not like you; courts reach legally lame decisions after decades of trying the same case; the educational system keeps turning out religiously thwarted minds and floods of ignorance - and it is possible to prolong this list to eternity...

the problem of turkey is defining a spirit of society that can offer a meaning to individuals for being a member of that commun-ity. the flags; the almost pathological fanaticism that permeates every collective activity which is born of epidemic diffidence; the volatile tempers denoting a problem with individuality; the readiness to violence, reminiscent of friedrich nietzche's famous hammer (****); are among signals that the society is actually pleading for a covenant to muster and conjoin around.

as that hope eludes people, moral (*****) disintegration worsens.

bleak picture eh? no, not really...

the "mind" seeks homeostasis, a "normal"ity, where in the course of life, perceptive shocks to the mental apparatus are tolerably minimized. sooner or later, not by military edict, not by divine inspiration from the imams of akp, not by arcane metaphysical obsessions that keep the souls of many turks under mortgage, not by the business sector with its eager greed to get rich fast, not by knowledgeable intellectuals or academics etc. either; but probably with the contributions of each and all of them, a movement toward a covenant that will establish the criteria of that homeostasis is bound to begin - of course, in the meantime, if you are not robbed, killed and then raped by a psycho, glue sniffing taxi driver, who mugs for profit on the side and also pimps prostitutes!...

except for or absolute idiots, being surprised is an exclusive luxury of societies with a sense of normalcy.

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(*) if i were a (michel) foucaultian, i'd write "auteur", with its emphasis more on authority than writing.
(**) no confrontation with the military is implied in this sentence. the message is that the akp has failed bad in inspiring confidence in its own faith in democracy or its consonance with ideas and life styles incongruent with its own ideology, or its fealty to the principle of rule of law. instead, its nepotism and partisan clientelism, its sub rosa and gradual policy of intimidating and suppressing difference in society, have alienated a sizable portion of the turkish society. there still are segments that align with akp, solely because they believe democracy can catch deeper roots if a counter-state social force can mature. still others siddle up to it because the other parties in opposition are even a sadder sight. those who essentially disaggree with akp's world view, but support it in the hope of pragmatic gains, constitute another category. if it had secured its position as a democratic and (since it is inevitable if democracy is to exist), an adequately secular party, any intervention in the akp's politics would be unacceptable even to the opposition (except, possibly, the republican peoples party).
(***) "normal" derives from "norm" (lat.), a carpenter's square, now used to describe a standard, a (social) rule.
(****) "to one who has a hammer for a tool, all problems look like nails."
(*****) less in the sense of universal ethics than a psychological source of repair where one justifies one's existence.