Markmaking

In India, a shift to meritocracy uproots old elites - Print Version - International Herald Tribune

Anand Giridharadas: India's New Men and Women

The newspapers print photographs of those who "top" the exams. They are routinely scrawny and dark-skinned, drawn from the distant suburbs and villages, Indians whose ancestors might have cooked and cleaned for the ancestors of the students they now displace. 

Visit the companies staffed by this new meritocracy, and you encounter a new elite. In the Indian offices of, say, Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, the paychecks are fat and the intellects razor-sharp. But they seldom speak English in the old, affected British way. They are coarser and yet more confident. They feel the world is theirs, but are less obsessed than the earlier elites with emulating the West. They are proudly indigenous, often preferring Indian food, music and movies to the alternatives. 

They are changing the language. On television, on college campuses, in businesses, you hear new-economy elites who sound much more Indian than their predecessors, their English unapologetically peppered with Hindi: "Let's go have some khana. I'm hungry, yaar." 

...

In Mumbai, this dualism is seared into geography. The northern suburbs were once backwaters. But areas like Bandra are now havens of energy, full of young people who come from elsewhere, thrive without parental string-pulling, pay their own rent, cook their own food. Meanwhile, in south Mumbai, the beauty and history of the place mask an impending social obsolescence.

Andrew Anthony on the Rushdie fatwa

In the Observer, Andrew Anthony on the Rushdie fatwa and its disgraceful fallout among spineless and self-abasing Westerners:

Iqbal Sacranie, the future head of the Muslim Council of Britain famously opined that "death, perhaps, is a bit too easy" for Rushdie. He was later knighted for services to community relations...

Ramin Gray, associate director of the Royal Court Theatre, recently admitted that he would be reluctant to stage a play that was critical of Islam. "You would think twice," he said. "You'd have to take the play on its merits but given the time we're in, it's very hard because you'd worry that if you cause offence then the whole enterprise would become buried in a sea of controversy. It does make you tread carefully."...

Almost any criticism of Islam or any of its adherents is likely to trigger accusations of Islamophobia. For example, in 2007 the Channel 4 documentary Undercover Mosque exposed various preachers making hateful and violent statements regarding women, Jews, homosexuals and infidels. By any journalistic measure it was a compelling and revelatory documentary. But in the media storm that followed it was not the inflammatory preachers but the programme-makers who found themselves subject to an inquisition....

Even a critic of The Satanic Verses, the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, who felt the book was insulting to Islam, signed a petition stating that "no blasphemy harms Islam and Muslims so much as the call for murdering a writer". Five years later Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck by Islamic extremists...

Inayat Bunglawala, spokesperson for the Jamaat-i-Islami-influenced Muslim Council of Britain, probably the most-often cited Islamic organisation in the country, passed both tests with flying colours. He was, in his own words, "elated" when Khomeini delivered the fatwa. "It was a very welcome reminder that British Muslims did not have to regard themselves just as a small, vulnerable minority; they were part of a truly global and powerful movement."...

Respecting culture has come to mean restricting debate. Malik quotes the sociologist Tariq Modood on this issue: "If people are to occupy the same political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each other's fundamental beliefs to criticism."...

Three years ago we came within a single parliamentary vote of being saddled with a law (the Religious Hatred Act) that meant you or I could be imprisoned for seven years for using insulting language, even if the insult was unintentional and referred to an established truth...

Jimmy Carter US president, 1977-81: "Rushdie's book is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated ... The death sentence proclaimed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, however, was an abhorrent response. It is our duty to condemn the threat of murder [but] we should be sensitive to the concern and anger that prevails even among the more moderate Muslims."

Germaine Greer writer and academic: "I refuse to sign petitions for that book of his, which was about his own troubles."

Gaza Tactics and Strategy

Nothing illustrates the nauseating moral idiocy of the "international community" more than the way that when one side arranges for the maximal endangerment of its own civilians, the other side attracts the lion's share of opprobrium.

A Gaza War Full of Traps and Trickery

Weapons are hidden in mosques, schoolyards and civilian houses, and the leadership’s war room is a bunker beneath Gaza’s largest hospital...

A new Israeli weapon, meanwhile, is tailored to the Hamas tactic of asking civilians to stand on the roofs of buildings so Israeli pilots will not bomb...

Hamas rocket and weapons caches, including rocket launchers, have been discovered in and under mosques, schools and civilian homes, the army says...

New York City to promote Connecticut economy

In its continuing effort to promote the Connecticut economy at the expense of its own, the New York City Council decided to pass a $1.2 billion property tax increase. Clearly, someone has to pay for the 40,000+ new city employees added during Mayor Bloomberg's term, and it might as well be city's the property owners. 

Property is already so cheap in New York City - why not make it even less affordable?

Are Better Schools and Economic Growth "Pro-Life"?

Calling Planned Parenthood "pro-life" sneakily switches the terms of the debate such that almost any good public policy is "pro-life," argues Ross Douthat at The Atlantic:

Now I'm obviously happy to have broad debates about public policy, and I certainly think that pro-lifers should be interested in crafting a broadly pro-family politics in addition to seeking a more pro-life legal regime. But the pro-life cause is primarily about issues of law, morality and justice, and if pro-lifers treat the broader pursuit of socioeconomic progress as a substitute for, rather than a complement to, the pursuit of legal protections for the unborn, then they've given up on their movement's raison d'etre to no good effect. Pro-lifers can and should be willing to compromise within the debate about how the law should treat unborn human life, by agreeing to legal regimes that stop short of their ultimate goal. But a "compromise" that involves giving up on that debate entirely in favor of arguments over which domestic-policy interventions will reduce the abortion rate on the demand side is no compromise at all

Cesar Chavez, Minuteman

Race vs. class in California - Steve Sailer on the tension between unionized farmworkers and the illegal-immigrant labor imported by growers in order to break strikes

The supply of migrant workers dropped to about 200,000, most of them American citizens, making unionization and better contracts feasible—as long as what Marx called “the reserve army of the unemployed” could be bottled up south of the border. The next year, Chavez began his storied organizing campaign.

Growers fought back by busing the reserve army up from Mexico. In 1979, Chavez bitterly testified to Congress:

… when the farm workers strike and their strike is successful, the employers go to Mexico and have unlimited, unrestricted use of illegal alien strikebreakers to break the strike. And, for over 30 years, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has looked the other way and assisted in the strikebreaking. I do not remember one single instance in 30 years where the Immigration service has removed strikebreakers. … The employers use professional smugglers to recruit and transport human contraband across the Mexican border for the specific act of strikebreaking…

In 1969, Chavez led a march to the Mexican border to protest illegal immigration. Joining him were Sen. Walter Mondale and Martin Luther King’s successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Ralph Abernathy.

The UFW picketed INS offices to demand closure of the border.

LRB - Zimbabwe - response to Mahmood Mamdani

In the LRB, R W Johnson responds to Mahmood Mamdani's whitewash of the Mugabe era

Mamdani’s article is a compendium of errors. He should know that the reason for the suspension of British aid for land reform was that the land was going to Mugabe’s cronies, not to the poor....

Mamdani writes of the ‘war vets’ as if they all wanted to be farmers: those who worked with them say that wasn’t so...

Mamdani describes the trade unions as if they were an Anglo-American creation and represented mainly Ndebeles. This is nonsense: ...

 Mamdani talks as if ‘land reform’ was a popular revolution, which is rather like writing a history of Cambodia in which Pol Pot’s genocidal re-ruralisation was carried out by popular demand...

Mamdani does not mention the fact that the land invasions were a massive attack on farm workers, whose numbers he gives as 300,000, though together with their families there were 2.4 million of them living on white farms...

Mamdani talks of the repression ‘in Ndebele areas in 1986’. Hasn’t he read the authoritative report Breaking the Silence, which shows how much wider than that the phenomenon was? 

Mamdani throughout underplays the huge role mass torture played in his supposed popular revolution..

Mamdani remarks ‘how little turmoil accompanied this massive social change’. The mass beatings, the torture, the killings have all been whited out.

Mahmood Mamdani never met a third-world dictator whose crimes he couldn't exculpate.

Mugabe's ruthlessness

How completely pathetic - Mugabe a past master of holding on to power

For a very literal example of Robert Mugabe's staying power, look no further than a recent crisis summit of southern African leaders designed to settle the political impasse that has seen the longtime Zimbabwean leader stubbornly cling to the presidency. 

The leaders wanted him to leave the room so they could deliberate in private. He refused. 

Between their misguided politeness and his famous capacity to intimidate, the presidents meekly backed down. Mugabe stayed.

No shortage of Third Worldists willing to make endless excuses for such monsters in the name of anti-imperialism.

Joseph Stiglitz for a prepackaged Detroit bankruptcy

Raging right-winger Joseph Stiglitz chimes in on the bailout question

FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Chapter 11 is the right road for US carmakers.

The failure lies with the managers of US carmakers and America’s financial markets, which failed in their oversight and encouraged short-sighted behaviour. The “bridge loan to nowhere” – the down payment on what could be a sinkhole of enormous proportions – is another example of the short-sighted behaviour that got us into this mess.

Post-Columbian population movements and the roots of world inequality

Louis Putterman and David N. Weil at VoxEU:

Post-Columbian population movements and the roots of world inequality

Why should we care about the apparently powerful influence that population origins exert on country and sub-national incomes levels?
First, if this influence is indeed as significant as our findings suggest it to be, then efforts to sort out the roles that geographic, institutional, and other factors play in explaining income levels and growth rates may produce misleading results unless we properly control for it.
Second, the influence of population origins suggests that there is something that human families and communities transmit from generation to generation -- perhaps a form of economic culture, a set of attitudes or beliefs, or informally transmitted capabilities -- that is of at least similar importance to economic success as are more widely recognized factors like quantities of physical capital and even human capital in the narrower sense of formal schooling. If we understand which culturally transmitted factors are important and what contributes to their emergence and propagation, we might be able to design policy interventions that could help less successful groups and countries to close their developmental gaps.