Monthly Archive

Awesome

As Hillary Clinton faces the two crucial primaries in her run for the Democratic Party nomination, pundits seem to have reached a consensus that her campaign is flat- lining. Blame has been cast all over, from her greatest asset turned liability, Bill, to her costly and clueless advisers, the trigger-happy staff, and finally onto Hillary herself: she’s just not likable enough, she’s too calculating, wants to win too badly, she’s been planning this for too long, trying too hard, looking too desperate…the list is long.

Elections are popularity contests writ large. No other race embodies this fact more prominently than the American presidential contest. Who would have thought that Barack, a product or racial and cultural admixture, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii well outside the US mainstream, would ever become a plausible presidential candidate! It seemed like the democratic roster was stuck between a likable candidate who wasn’t winnable, and a winnable candidate wasn’t all that likable. But Obama has definitely proved the pundits wrong, at least as far as the primaries are concerned, he’s winning because he is likable and Hillary is losing because she is not. Likability is her brick wall. The heart overrides the mind all too often for us mere humans, sometimes we can’t help who we like, and voting is an emotional act as much as it is a rational one. Of course it doesn’t help that while lacking “experience” Barack is just as smart and credentialled as she is. He is easy to like and easy to vote for.

The main question I have though is whether the issue of likability can become a no-win trap for female presidential candidates in the US. Women are fainting at Obama’s rallies and it’s not from the crowdedness or the heat alone. Gail Collins from the NYT points out:

Contrary to rumor, he is not planting those people who faint from excitement at his rallies. Nevertheless, they continue to topple, and by now Barack is so used to this particular crisis that it has become almost a part of the rally routine. “If we have an E.M.T. in the house, I think somebody got faint,” he said calmly when a woman keeled over in front of the stage in Cincinnati. “They just need a little water and some juice.”

Check out Obama’s own narration of these incidents at various rallies:

http://www.breitbart.tv/html/48404.html

Wall Street Journal’s article We Shall Be Overcome is quite entertaining:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110011130

Charisma, that ineffable star quality, is key to rendering unconventional candidates palatable to the general public (see JFK vis a vis Catholicism). However would sheer charisma be an asset for a woman the way it is for a man? This whole fainting business I think encapsulates the catch-22 that any female presidential candidate would face. Obama’s charisma is an unadulterated good for his campaign. The more women that faint at his rallies the better. Men want to be him, women want to be with him. But imagine if men were catcalling and serenading Hillary at her rallies. For a woman who attempts to run for arguably the most high status job in the world, there is a such a thing as being too attractive, too distractingly beautiful for the all too serious job. A successful female candidate has to be likable in a particular way without being too likable. She must avoid sexualization and fit herself into the matronly mold without being perceived as a boring scold. Seems next to impossible to me as a winning formula in the American context. A male candidate however does not need to worry about all that, he can be a hunk, a brainiac and “presidential” enough to be commander in chief. Basically, he can have it all.

So as long as a qualified and smart woman like Hillary is running against a somewhat less qualified, just as smart, rockstar candidate like Obama, the ending seems unlikely to be a happy one for her. If she is however running against a mere human male then her chances might become a tad more favorable. The odds stacked against Hillary are fundamentally more daunting than those against Barack. Charm and charisma allow people to look past his blackness and his “other” ness. Lack of charisma all but dooms Hillary. However, even if Hillary had boatloads of charm and charisma unless she could modulate it just right, she as a woman would surely risk being categorized in less than flattering ways by the general public and the media.

Professor Bradford DeLong has this pointer:

You take a look at the standard Human Development Indicator variables–GDP per capita, infant mortality, education–and you try to throw together an HDI for Cuba in the late 1950s, and you come out in the range of Japan, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Israel. Today? Today the UN puts Cuba’s HDI in the range of Lithuania, Trinidad, and Mexico…Thus I don’t understand lefties who talk about the achievements of the Cuban Revolution: “…to have better health care, housing, education, and general social relations than virtually all other comparably developed countries.” Yes, Cuba today has a GDP per capita level roughly that of–is “comparably developed”–Bolivia or Honduras or Zimbabwe, but given where Cuba was in 1957 we ought to be talking about how it is as developed as Italy or Spain.

Sharp, insightful analysis by Firas Ahmad at Islamica Magazine on Barack Obama’s calculated distancing of himself from the American Muslim community. Choice paragraphs:

So if Obama has a campaign strategist worth his or her weight, we will never hear any serious public support or defense of Muslims from him or his campaign. For Muslims to demand anything from him simply demonstrates a misunderstanding of reality. Muslim support for Obama is akin to George Bush’s support for democracy in the Middle East. The mere association with the former will undercut the credibility of the latter. It is an analogy that Muslims should understand.

Obama’s lack of public defense of Islam is not so much an indictment against him as it is a demonstration of the infantile state of Muslim political participation in America.

…

This is a political reality that Muslims in America must face. It is a clear demonstration that the collective efforts of Muslim institution building over the last 20 years have largely failed to make any real progress when it comes to impacting the American political process, at least at the national level. Muslims have found the perfect candidate, but cannot vocally support him for fear that if they do, they may be the reason he loses. How is that for a wake-up call.

…

If Muslims do not want to suffer the indignation of political irrelevance for many elections to come, instead of giving money to politicians, they should start investing in journalism scholarships. They should establish fellowships for Muslim academics to take a year off and write a book for a general audience, and then back them up with a PR firm to get the book on a best seller list. They should invest in publications that demonstrate a breadth and depth of thinking on a range of issues. They should invest in think tanks that analyze public issues and present actual value to the overall public discussion. All of these institutions exist right now for Muslims in America. But for the most part they are underfunded, underappreciated and undervalued. Because the community in general has not rallied behind them, they are for the most part invisible. Because they are invisible, Muslims are effectively invisible when it comes to Obama or any other serious candidate.

Read the whole thing.

If you have checked out Islamica Magazine, you should. The pieces are extremely well-written, and a wide variety of opinions and perspectives are represented. The team leading the effort is incredible (full disclosure: A number of them are friends who I have a lot of regard and affection for at a personal level.)  Pick up a copy at your nearest Barnes and Noble. You will be pleasantly surprised by the amazing production values of the magazine.

Daily Star reports:

The Bangladesh Bank (BB) yesterday asked all commercial banks to submit proposals within two weeks on how to reduce interest spread between lending and deposit rates and charges for different services.

The central bank observed that the state-owned commercial banks charge reasonably for different services, but the rates charged by local private commercial banks are high while those by foreign commercial banks, too high.

…
“We are not imposing anything on the banks respecting the climate of free market economy,” he said adding, “But at the same time we are alert so that none can take any irrational opportunity.”

Can someone explain what this “irrational opportunity” is?

I think BAB’s response has been pretty much on-point

BAB Chairman Nazrul Islam Majumder, however, defended the current rates saying that running private commercial banks requires higher expenses as they need skilled staff on high pay.

“It will be difficult for us to reduce the lending rates unless the interest on savings certificates and treasury bonds are slashed,” Majumder said, talking to the reporters.

“The governor has assured us that the central bank will set the interest rate spread after discussion with all stakeholders,” he said.

There’s a better way. It’s called letting competition do it’s magic.

There are arguments to be made for intervention in many cases. This isn’t one of those cases.

Does this setup from the Middle Ages in Europe looks familiar?

As usual, the podestà – a city official – was the interrogator, who regarded external evidence as providing mere clues of guilt. Europe was then still governed by Roman law which required confessions in order to convict. As Grafton describes horrifyingly, once the prisoner’s answers no longer satisfied the podestà, the torturer tied the man’s or woman’s arms behind their back and the prisoner would then be lifted by a pulley, agonisingly, towards the ceiling. “Then, on orders of the podestà, the torturer would make the accused ‘jump’ or ‘dance’ – pulling him or her up, then releasing the rope, dislocating limbs and inflicting stunning pain.”

And some food for thought:

When a member of one of the Trent Jewish families, Samuel, asked the podestà where he had heard that Jews needed Christian blood, the interrogator replied – and all this while, it should be remembered, Samuel was dangling in the air on the pulley – that he had heard it from other Jews. Samuel said that he was being tortured unjustly. “The truth, the truth!” the podestà shouted, and Samuel was made to “jump” up to eight feet, telling his interrogator: “God the Helper and truth help me.” After 40 minutes, he was returned to prison.

Once broken, the Jewish prisoners, of course, confessed. After another torture session, Samuel named a fellow Jew. Further sessions of torture finally broke him and he invented the Jewish ritual murder plot and named others guilty of this non-existent crime. Two tortured women managed to exonerate children but eventually, in Grafton’s words, “they implicated loved ones, friends and members of other Jewish communities”. Thus did torture force innocent civilians to confess to fantastical crimes. Oxford historian Lyndal Roper found that the tortured eventually accepted the view that they were guilty.

Check out the whole thing.

I have been kept from blogging for the last few weeks for a variety of reasons. First, soon after returning from Dhaka, I fell ill with the flu and it took me about a week to recover after a week of coughing and general feverishness. And then, I got busy with organizing this conference on climate change on campus. Of course, there are papers and whatnot due over the course of the next few weeks, but do expect me to write on these pages more often than I have recently (as low as that bar is…), particularly as February 21 approaches.

In the mean time: I find many arguments for torture in the Bangladeshi context (see comment section in the link) to be appalling. The argument of “what if a bomb were to go off killing thousands (or even tens of people) if you didn’t torture” just don’t apply here. The best argument that can be made is that the security apparatus has limited resources and certain ends, and these ends have to be met under the constraints of the limited resources, and torture seems to be the shortest route. If one were to argue at the level of crass utilitarianism the way that such arguments are made (and I am in no way prepared to concede that this is the level at which the arguments is to be played out) , then one is must, to defend the pro-torture position, ask what the ends really are, whether torture really gets you there, and whether alternative routes that are claimed to be unavailable (such as people using their heads a little better) are really so. I think any honest discussion will find that torture of the kind that is alleged to have happened to Tasneem Khalil, or for that matter, to Tarique Zia, or Ghiasuddin Mamun fails even a first-pass cost-benefit test. Can someone tell me what the ends are of such torture - except to intimidate, and to punish without trial or evidence? Let’s assume that the ends are legitimate - information - does torture really get you accurate and credible information? And let’s say it does (and there’s enough evidence out there that it doesn’t), then how does torture stack up against alternatives? Everyone claims to know that these political figures were corrupt. And yet when it comes to getting evidence for it, we have to depend upon torture! Paper trails, people, paper trails… If your best case for torture is that you are too lazy or inefficient or ineffective to find inevitable paper trails - then I am sorry, you do not have a very good case at all.

The discussion though, must go beyond that. The truth is that we have not internalized the value of human dignity and human life. That’s where the discussion should be, but rarely is.

And this lack of internalization that manifests itself in torture is not just a problem we face because we have a military government. It’s a little disingenuous to claim that things would be much better had we been under the BNP or AL.