This week, the By The Fault Weekend Reader looks at the question of who are we?
From Big Think:
Who Are We?
Niall Ferguson, Professor of History, Harvard University
David Kennedy, Professor of History, Stanford University
Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Psychology, University of Virginia
Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.
Christian Chavagneux and Ronen Palan’s Les Paradis Fiscaux is a great (and mercifully short) introduction to tax heavens, banking secrecy and the offshore financial world. And it’s in French. For my non-French readers, not to worry, hopefully, my review will give enough substantial information… or, y’all could learn French! However, I have preserved what I think are the best quotes in the original language so as to preserve their value.
The book’s central thesis is that the development of offshore financial centers since the 1960s is an integral part of the dynamics of contemporary globalization, both in the financial and productive sectors. Tax heavens are now a pillar without which contemporary economic globalization could not function.
And surprisingly, they have not been studied to the extent that they should have been. For orthodox economic literature, tax heavens are a product of overtaxation in industrialized countries or a simple manifestation of informal economies. Both views are faulty according to Chavagneux and Palan.
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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.
Via the Independent,
“Ahmet Yildiz, 26, a physics student who represented his country at an international gay gathering in San Francisco last year, was shot leaving a cafe near the Bosphorus strait this week. Fatally wounded, the student tried to flee the attackers in his car, but lost control, crashed at the side of the road and died shortly afterwards in hospital. His friends believe Mr Yildiz was the victim of the country’s first gay honour killing. (…)
Bungled efforts by a religious-minded government to loosen the grip of Turkey’s authoritarian version of secularism have triggered a court case aimed at shutting the ruling party down, with a verdict expected within a month.
Against this backdrop, the issues of women’s rights, sexuality and the place of religion in the public arena have been particularly contentious. Ahmet Yildiz’s crime, his friends say, was to admit openly to his family that he was gay.
“From the day I met him, I never heard Ahmet have a friendly conversation with his parents,” one close friend and near neighbour recounted. “They would argue constantly, mostly about where he was, who he was with, what he was doing.”
The family pressure increased, the friend explained. “They wanted him to go back home, see a doctor who could cure him, and get married.” Shortly after coming out this year, Mr Yildiz went to a prosecutor to complain that he was receiving death threats. The case was dropped. Five months later, he was dead. The police are now investigating his murder. For gay rights groups, the student’s inability to get protection was a typical by-product of the indifference, if not hostility, with which a broad swathe of Turkish society views homosexuality. The military, for example, sees it as an “illness”. Men applying for an exemption to obligatory military service on grounds of homosexuality must provide proof – either in the form of an anal examination, or photographs.
“The media ignores or laughs off violence against gays,” says Buse Kilickaya, a member of the gay lobbying group Pink Life, adding that Ahmet Yildiz’s death “risks being swept under the carpet and forgotten like other cases in the past”. Turkey has a history of honour killings. A government survey earlier this year estimated that one person every week dies in Istanbul as a result of honour killings. It put the nationwide death toll at 220 in 2007. In the majority of cases, the victims are women, but Mr Yildiz’s friends suspect he may be the first recorded victim of a homosexual honour killing.
“We’ve been trying to contact Ahmet’s family since Wednesday, to get them to take responsibility for the funeral,” one of the victim’s friends said yesterday, standing outside the morgue where his body has been for three days. “There’s no answer, and I don’t think they are going to come.” The refusal of families to bury their relatives is common after honour-related murders.
Mazhar Bagli, a Turkish sociologist who has interviewed 189 people convicted of honour killings, has never heard of a death revolving around homosexuality but has no doubt that it could be used as justification. “Honour killings cleanse illicit relationships. For women, that is a broad term. Men are allowed more sexual freedom, but homosexuality is still seen by some as beyond the pale.”"
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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.
Via Context Crawler, thanks to a new article in the American Sociological Review, we should revisit the zombie meme of Opt-Out, the already-debunked idea that women are leaving the workforce to return to homemaking responsibilities. It is a meme that won’t die (hence, the zombie part) because it seems to validate the social conservative and “family values” crowd that women REALLY belong at home with their children and if everyone understood and abide by that, the entire society would be better off.
The correlated belief is that the family is the base institutional structure of society, which has not been true in several centuries, as Stephanie Coontz has aptly demonstrated. But then, social conservatives and “family values experts” are never really bothered by facts and truth. After all, they still maintain that abstinence-only program and virginity pledges work, despite the evidence.
But back to the Opt-Out myth.
According to sociologist Christine Percheski, the author of the ASR article, debunks the myth:
“Despite anecdotal reports of successful working women returning to the home to assume child care responsibilities, less than 8 percent of professional women born since 1956 leave the workforce for a year or more during their prime childbearing years, according to the study,
Percheski’s research shows that the number of women with young children who work full-time year-round has increased steadily, growing from a rate of 5.6 percent of women born 1926 to 1935 (referred to as the “Baby Boom Parents” by Percheski), to 38.1 percent of women from Generation X (born 1966 to 1975). More professional Generation X mothers of young children were working full-time year-round than their counterparts in any previous generation.
Percheski finds that among mothers of older children (those age 6 to 18), full-time employment is the norm for professional women of Generation X.”
Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.
As an addendum to my post of the Bhopal disaster, I would like to bring into the discussion the Risk Society theory that is, in my view, fundamental to the understanding of contemporary society in the global context.
What do the Bhopal industrial disaster, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown, the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the epidemics of mad cow disease, and the widespread use of genetically modified crops have in common? According to German sociologist Ulrich Beck, they all indicate the rise of a world risk society.
According to Beck (1992), the world risk society is a product of modernity. Since the industrial revolution, one of the major large-scale societal issues was the reduction of scarcity. The solution was to develop and use technology to produce enormous numbers of goods and increase the general level of wealth for the populations of industrial societies. This was successful: scarcity is hardly a problem in post-industrial societies (core areas). If anything, abundance is. Generally speaking, people no longer starve in developed countries, quite the contrary, obesity has become a problem.
However, this mass production of goods has been accompanied by the production of “bads” or, in other words, risks. Beck defines risk as “a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself. Risks, as opposed to older dangers, are consequences which relate to the threatening force of modernization and to its globalization of doubt" (1992: 21). As such, risks have several characteristics that distinguish them from dangers in previous periods of human history.
Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.
A great lady is dead. Most people are probably not familiar with her and it’s a damn shame! The Guardian has a good obituary:
“Ruth Cardoso, who has died aged 77, was a leading Brazilian anthropologist and former first lady renowned for her pioneering work with the poor. Despite her prominent public position, she was notorious for her discretion, avoiding the press and rarely giving interviews. But when she did speak one idea was ever present: that, for Brazil to progress, an understanding of its historical and sociological roots was fundamental. “We have only advanced because we have history,” she told a local TV station shortly before her death.
Born in Araraquara, Cardoso studied at the University of São Paulo. After graduating in 1953, she married Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a sociologist whom she had met during her student days and who went on to become the Brazilian president. Following the 1964 military takeover, Ruth and her husband were forced into exile, living in France, Chile, the US and later the UK, where she became an associate scholar at the Centre of Latin American Studies, Cambridge. (…)
She also became one of the first Brazilian academics to carry out detailed studies of the country’s favelas or shanty towns, settlements that were not included on many city maps until the 1990s. She played a fundamental role in pushing impoverishment and marginalisation on to the academic agenda.
In 1995, during the first year of her husband’s presidency, she seized the opportunity to put her ideas into practice, creating Comunidade Solidária (Community Solidarity) a project which, among other things, brought literacy to 3 million young Brazilians. Her innovative use of public-private partnerships in the fight against poverty, illiteracy and hunger, developed during the period of her husband’s rule, are now seen by many as the basis of Bolsa Familia, a wide-reaching aid programme implemented by Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and which is today being replicated in numerous Latin American and African countries.
A staunch feminist who supported a woman’s right to abortion, Cardoso reputedly hated the term “first lady”, which she described as being an unnecessary Americanism. “A first lady is a human being, not a Barbie,” she told the influential news magazine Veja. (…)
Though her husband was no longer in office, “Dona Ruth” vowed to continue her social crusade, creating an NGO called Comunitas, which worked with education and vocational training, and supported small business initiatives in poor rural areas.”
Truly sad. (Wikipedia page)
Entrevista com Dra. Ruth Cardoso realizada durante o X Congresso Internacioanal de Cidades Educadoras no dia 26 de maio de 2008. Antes de tudo, o Brasil e o globo pierde uma dama digna prudente sensible, um exemplo da mulher contemporânea. O Brasil perdeu uma grande mulher. Se lamenta a morte de dona Ruth Cardoso.
Notícia em português
Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.
Via the Guardian, the surveillance society is going global:
“A comprehensive transatlantic pact clearing the way for the unprecedented supply of private data on European citizens to the American authorities is to be promoted by France in support of the US-driven campaign to combat terrorism and transnational crime.
The French government is expected to use its six-month presidency of the EU, starting tomorrow, to build on 18 months of confidential negotiations between Washington and Brussels aimed at clearing the complex legal obstacles to the exchange of personal information with the Americans.
The controversial proposed pact, a “framework agreement” on common data protection principles, is likely to enable the Americans to access the credit card histories, banking details and travel habits of Europeans, although senior officials in Brussels deny US reports that the Americans will also be able to snoop on the internet browsing records of Europeans.”
Have I ever mentioned how much I dislike President Sarkozy and his administration?
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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.
Louise Arbour, outgoing UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, give an interview to Le Monde as she takes stock of the current state of human rights around the world.
Every time human rights are mentioned in conversation or even academic meetings, the objection always comes up that human rights are a Western creation that the United States and European countries are ramming down people’s throats all over the world. It is nonsense, of course (to everyone who knows the history of the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), and it is reverse patronizing (as if only Western people could have come up with the idea of human rights).
But now, emerging countries, groups and powers such as China, Russia or the Muslim world claim a right to a different version of human rights (unsurprisingly, one that is much more restrictive, in terms of, well… rights). So how do we preserve the universality of these rights?
According to Louise Arbour, there are different lines of fracture in this debate. Developing countries, including China, tend to favor social and economic rights more than civil and political rights whereas the United States has done the opposite. This is a line of fracture inherited from the Cold War.
But the main line of fracture now has to do with the rise of religious groups, especially fundamentalist groups who declare these rights secular and therefore inapplicable to them. These groups claim that they should be adjusted.
Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. The views expressed in this post are mine only.
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts on reports - most of the time by IRIN - on the deplorable conditions under which women and girls live in many parts of the world. However, the articles have been piling up in my Newsreader, so, it’s time for one. So here we go:
First stop, Liberia with the always painful topic of fistula.
“Of 600 rape victims recently interviewed by a Liberian non-governmental organisation, 90 percent of the women were found to be suffering from fistulas – a vaginal tear which results in loss of bladder control and social stigmatisation.
Aid workers say the statistic, provided by the Women of Liberia Peace Network (WOLPNET) from surveys conducted in April 2008, shows the horrifying prevalence of rape and of a phenomenon which Liberian medical officials say they are ill-equipped to respond to.”
There are two types of fistulas that are prevalent in parts of Africa:
Obstetric fistula, which is a vaginal tear resulting from prolonged obstructed labor. This form of fistulas is responsible for the appalling numbers of maternal death (deaths while in labor) in this area because of the increased risk of vaginal bleeding right after childbirth. And since a lot of women give birth at home, attended by a midwife, if they are lucky, they just bleed to death. Liberia has a particularly high rate of such deaths and this rate has been going up since the end of the war in 2003 as a result of the poor state of the health care system. With only 300 midwives when the country needs around 1,400, it is not surprising:
Maternal mortality has gone up by about 71 percent with 994 women dying for every 100,000 who give birth, compared to 580 out of every 100,000 women in the previous survey.”
The situation is so bad that the Liberian government has put in place different programs to recruit health workers and re-train the existing ones to include more obstetrics and gynecology in their skills as well as get health workers and midwives to emphasize family planning with their patients.
The other type of fistula is “traumatic gynaecologic fistula that is a vaginal injury resulting from violent sexual assault or when objects are forcibly inserted into the vagina.” (Just typing that makes my skin crawl)
Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. Views expressed here are mine and mine only.
This third part of my report from the GSA conference (part 1 and part 2 ) was truly the best, from my point of view, because it featured a speech by one of my favorite sociologists (if not THE favorite), William Robinson, of UC Santa Barbara. He is the author of what I consider the authoritative social theory book on globalization: A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World.
In his presentation, Robinson contrasted his approach to globalization as qualitatively different phenomenon (transnationalism) as opposed to the school of thought he labeled “new imperialism.” Robinson’s view of globalization involves specific features:
So, for the maths-oriented among us: Globalization = TNS + TNC + TCC = true transnationalism.
What we are seeing then, for Robinson, is a reconfiguration of the power of the nation-state as agent of the TNCs, TCC and TNS. The nation-state does not disappear but is displaced in influence. It is one level of power that transnational agents use for their own purposes, for instance, when countries that are members of the EU use their national institutions to implement transnational directives coming from above (the EU level) or when countries again use national institutions to enforce WTO rulings.
This system, though, is in crisis on several levels: