Culture: August 2007 Archives

Neocon madness marches on. It's time for Americans and the global community to bring criminal charges against necons for promoting and conducting an illegal war.

"The goal of the neocons is a U.S.-Israeli-dominated region, patrolled by U.S. troops and divided into a large number of much smaller statelets."

"The idea is to create - and preside over - a condition of permanent instability. There is no better way to justify the permanent presence of U.S. troops and plenty of aid to U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes."

by Justin Raimondo
The idea that we invaded and occupied Iraq and launched a bid to "transform" the Middle East because we wanted to install liberal, democratic societies in the region is just not believable on many levels, and certainly recent headlines about the Palestinian coup by Fatah against Hamas - and the president's endorsement of the Abbas putsch - underscore this point. One year after Hamas soundly defeated the old, corrupt Fatah movement at the polls, the former has been expelled from the government by the unilateral action of "President" Abbas and is outlawed in the West Bank - where the Fatah-Bush theory of the "unitary presidency" apparently holds sway.


"Democracy" in the Middle East marches on!

Elections in the Middle East are like those in the European Union - if the Powers-That-Be don't get the result they want, then the results are overturned and a new election is held… a process that continues until the people learn their lesson, i.e., that resistance is futile, and ratify what has already been decided.

From the occupied territories to the war-torn cities of Iraq, what was sold as an effort to export "democracy" has instead turned into an effort to import chaos, death, and universal destruction. The "liberation" of Iraq hasn't let the democratic genie out of the bottle, but it has unleashed sectarian demons that have engulfed the country in a vicious civil war. In Lebanon, our effort to aid the Sunnis as a counterbalance to the Shi'ite Hezbollah has boomeranged, with the Fatah al-Islam group rising up against the U.S.-supported government. In Afghanistan, the regime of "President" Karzai can barely claim control of the capital city of Kabul, while in Pakistan, our biggest and most important ally in the Muslim world, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is being buffeted by the tides of pro-Islamic, anti-American public opinion, and is not expected to last much longer.

By any rational measure, the results of our Middle Eastern policy of regime-change in Iraq and bullying intervention throughout the region have been an abysmal failure from beginning to end. By neoconservative Bizarro World standards, however, what we are witnessing is a smashing success.

Full story: U.S.: Nihilism and Neoconservatism (Brothers under the skin)

U.S.: Kids and Marriage No Longer Inseparable

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"Boys without fathers in the home are 300 times more likely to get into trouble with the law. Girls without a father in the home are five times more likely to become promiscuous."

By Janice Shaw Crouse

More and more people are separating marriage from childbearing and children.

In a culture where everybody talks about doing what is best for kids, more and more people are separating marriage from childbearing and childrearing. A just-released Pew survey of over 2,000 adults indicates what the Washington Post calls a "widening gap between parenthood and marriage." While parents are crazy about their kids, they no longer view them as a reason for marriage. In fact, out of the nine factors being measured by Pew as essential to success in marriage, children came in next to last. A mere 41 percent of those responding to the Pew survey said that children are important to a good marriage. In contrast, in 1990 fully 65 percent of respondents claimed that children are part of a good marriage.

In other words, marriage today is all about the adults' preferences; it is all about "me."

Full story: U.S.: Kids and Marriage No Longer Inseparable

"We should learn how to use and improve modern informational webs’ for the sake of culture and enlightenment"

Moscow, Interfax - Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed his concern about the lowering cultural level of modern youth.

'According to the experts, people, and especially young ones, are losing their skills to vividly express their minds, to identify inflections and nuances. Many young people are hardly aware or even isolated of their cultural roots,' Putin said on Wednesday as he opened a meeting of the Presidential Council for Culture and Art in the Kremlin.

Full story: Russian president anxious about youth isolation from cultural roots

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This page is a archive of entries in the Culture category from August 2007.

Culture: May 2007 is the previous archive.

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