Aristotle, Assos, Republicanism; Law above all individuals and parties

A bit later this evening I'm taking the night bus to Aegean Turkey, sometime tomorrow I will get to Assos right on the coast.  Assos goes back to Ancient times when it was a Greek colony.  Aristotle spend a few years there in exile from the politics in Athens.

I will speak to some philosophy students visiting Turkey about Ancient Liberty.  I will concentrate on Aristotle's Politics, and my recent reading on it has lead me to think about many ambiguities in Aristotle's account of a republic which is a word translators are using as synonymous with constitutional state or political state, or state governed by a group of free men.  One thing that struck me is the strong emphasis on law above everything in the community.  H says that democracy rests on law, not on majority decisions.  

We should be careful about discussing very specific situations through reference to political theory, but there are times when it is inevitable.   Looking at all this talk from the EU that the Turkish courts are wrong to examine a closure case against Turkey's governing AKP, which is rooted in religious conservatism.

Whether the case is right or wrong, republican theory since Aristotle suggests that freedom and democracy rest on law not popular will at any one moment.

Experimental new parallel home: http://homepage.mac.com/barrystocker/Personal1.html

I have a new experimental home for the blog under the title of Barry Stocker's Weblog.  This is part of my trial period using .mac.  .mac is a service available to owners of Apple Macintosh computers, providing a webpage/blog home, online storage of computer files, online photograph albums, an email address amongst other thing.  Like most things associated with Apple and Macintosh computers, it is extraordinarily beautiful.  However, after a free trial it has to be paid for, so I need time to decide on this.  In the meantime posts will appear here and in the link indicated.

This has arisen because I am the proud and happy owner of  a new MacBook (white, 2.4 GHz) which I am writing on a this very moment.  I have gone further than many users towards having a very pure and integrated Mac experience through two choices: my default browser is Safari, which is native to the Mac OS; my default document creating suite is Apple's iWork, which includes Pages for creating text documents and Key Notes for computerised presentations.  The browser and the document suite are both beautiful in appearance and functioning, and integrated with the beautiful integration already present in the OS and in the relation between the appearance of the OS and the appearance of the computer.  More on these issues later.    

AKP Authoritarians Trying to Dominate Higher Eduction: A Threat to Secularism and to Academic Freedom

Today I saw that the AKP government in Turkey is still trying to impose its will on higher education, by appointing the rectors of new public universities in Turkey.  A lot of such universities are opening and this is an important issue.  It is well established that faculty vote for the Rector in any public university.  AKP is trying to encroach on academic autonomy in order to find jobs for its friends and impose its ideology on Turkish society.  They are good at flying below the radar, in a stealth approach to increasing the social and political influence of religious conservatism in Turkey. 

I would grudgingly vote for Obama Barack: Thoughts on the United States Presidential Election

I am not convinced by Barack's brand of self-inflating rhetoric of hope and change.  In policy terms it seems to mostly mean a growth of spending and regulation.  Some proposed regulation is necessary and welcome (on expanding health insurance for example) but there is no sprit of restraint. Despite Obama's presentation of himself as above politics, his campaigners were caught out assuring the Canadian government that his anti-free trade line will not be followed in office.  

The Republicans have had 8 years and it has not been a good eight years.  The 'War on Terror' has been used to attack the liberties of US citizens, particularly through the Patriot Act.  Foreign prisoners have been tortured by presidential permission at Guntanamo Bay.  Iraq has been turned into an eat all you can buffet for a variety of Islamist gangs, who have tortured and murdered Christians and rival Muslims under a weak Iranian oriented government of soft Islamists, northern Iraq has continued to be a based for Kurdish separatists in the PKK terrorist movement.  Theşr continuing attacks on Turkey are a great evil in themselves and are poisoning Turkish politics, contributing to the revival of a neurotic and defensive nationalism (earlier today I saw a beautiful black Lamborghini in Nişantişi with a red Turkish flag symbol replacing the usual blue EU sşde field on one end of the number plate, all a bit ironic and very indicative)  The region continues to be dangerous and unstable for Israelis and Arabs.  The US economy has declined sharply form the condition in which Bush inherited it.  Government spending had shot up on both defence and social programs, at the same time as a huge cut in taxes on share dividends had weakened the tax base.  Scientific advice on the environment has been ignored or overruled by administration members.  AIDS programs and sex education at home and abroad has been slanted towards trying to impose pre-marital virginity as the ideal, under the influence of religious extremists.  This is a record of incompetence and bad policy which needs to be punished.

The Republicans showed pragmatism in selecting McCain as their presidential candidate, in some circumstances I could support his election, but the overriding priority now must be to put the Republicans in the doghouse for  a minimum of four and maybe eight years.  The Democrats must get the White House and strengthen their hold on both houses of Congress.  The Republicans need to purge, or at least marginalise, the Theocons, the national security conservatives and the  militant forms of Neoconservatism (which in its more moderate forms is is a benign form of universalist democratic idealism) and this will take time.  The party needs to establish a large amount of distance from policies of torture, restricting civil liberties, enforcing conservative and intolerant forms of Christianity, and fantasies of defending US interests through: reinventing foreign states, attempts at unilateral restructuring of whole regions, attempts to turn conflicts between the US and other countries into reruns of World War Two.  There must certainly be an end to insults and humiliations directed at those European governments which see some of these problems differently.  

It has to be Obama Barack .  Getting the first African-American into the  White House would be wonderful, and I hope that some socially tolerant Republicans will support Obama Barack to counterbalance the kind of blue collar conservative Democrat who apparently can support Clinton but never Barack.  Barack needs to choose a Vice-Presidential candidate with Reagen Democrats of that kind in mind.

Changes to the Blog and my new Mac

Previous layout was too fussy and full of stuff that was of secondary importance at best in the side bar.  Present format tries to focus on blog contents, while referring readers to other blogs where they might follow up what I discuss.  

I've spent so much time recently thinking about computers and computing, I've added that a major area of blogging content and it will feature quite regularly.  I am picking up a new Macintosh tomorrow (White MacBook, 2.4 GHz ).  I did not get one in Turkey as Mac prices are twice the US price and about two-thirds more than the British price.  The Apple shops here are all resellers, are small with limited stock, and the staff are mostly not well informed.  I'm delighted to see a growth of Apple resellers in Istanbul, but I could not find a case for my iPod classic suitable for attaching to my arm when I go out for a run, and when I was looking for new earphones for it, the assistant thought my iPod Classic was an iPhone.  If I had an iPod Touch, which is roughly speaking an iPhone without the telephone, I would have understood.  That's a shop in walking distance of where I live in a very good big shopping centre, but I have yet to buy anything in Pupa (the Apple reseller) and maybe I never will.  The MacBook comes courtesy of Amazon.com.  I shpped it to the daughter of a friend.  All going well I will pick it up in a few hours and will be blogging from it soon afterwards.

AKP Closing Down Pig Farms in Turkey

Time for AKP fans who claim it is moderate and secular to wake up. The real insidious pressure to Islamicise Turkey is shown in a a report on the BBC News website. The BBC has generally gone along with the moderate liberalising reformist line on AKP, so this is important.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7368020.stm

As the story reveals, pork butchers associated with the Armenian and Greek communities are being forced out of business on the pretext of hygiene standards on pork farms. Pressures are being applied on pig farmers which are not being applied on other farms and ALL pig farms have had licenses withdrawn. The government is hiding behind the excuse of 'European standards' on hygiene to Islamicise society and attack an economic activity associated with Greeks and Armenians. This is an attack on secularism and on the rights of Turkish Greeks and Armeni ans. Time for all you people who claim that AKP is the most liberal reformist party in Turkey to wake up to reality, to the real danger. I've been willing to give AKP the benefit of the doubt, but evidence is beginning to accumulate of an insidious step by step attack on secularism. Time to stop all this 'post-secularist' nonsense of 'preferring religious conservatives to laicists. Post-secularism is not exiciting and innovative, it is a cover for giving into backward looking intolerance and social repression.

Habermas and German Nationalism

A very useful collection of Habermas texts on line can be found at: http://www.helsinki.fi/~amkauppi/hablinks.html

It is no doubt rather harsh to link Jürgen Habermas with German nationalism, Habermas epitome of decent rationalist sort of Marxist sort of left-liberal German democrat.  His thought repudiates all Nationalism in favour of cosmopolitan democratic procedures based on the ethics of discourse undistorted by the interests of power.  He devotes himself to Constitutional Patriotism, which rests on loyalty to constitutional arrangements rather than loyalty to culture, ethnicity, race or religion.  

But this becomes another form of German Nationalism?  Who has supposedly provided an example of Constitutional Patriotism? The post-war Federal Republic of Germany of course.  

Which nation reacted most strong against proto-totalitarian Jacobin Terror during the French Revolution, supposedly?  Germany of course, though one might point out that Edmund Burke pointed out this aspect of the French Revolution before it had happened.  Statist elements in Fichte and Hegel are overlooked by Habermas.  What about the consequences of Marxist utopianism in politics: totalitarianism  What about Marx's anti-semitism in On the Jewish Question?  What about the nationalist element in the thought of liberal thinker and sociologist Max Weber?  Though quite rightly, Weber would certainly think something is missing from the idea of Constitutional Patriotism,which rests on an ideal of passionless depersonalised discourse.    If we look at a great German liberal of that time, Wilhelm Von Humboldt, we find a regret for the passing of constant war in human civilisation and a strong belief in the 'Nation' as the source of laws, unified by the interplay of constant dialogue.

Humboldt has some leanings towards militaristic nationalism, along with the limited state.  His emphasis on dialogue provides a source for Habermas' discourse ethics and democracy of deliberation.  No mention of how that works out in conjunction with Humboldt.  Where is Marx, who turns a Humboldtian emphasis on freedom through dialogue into a socialism/communism where individuals flourish in their freedom from the state? 

Habermas overlooks Naziism and its place in German history while defining Germany as the home land of constitutional patriotism.  Patriotism requires more than loyalty to a constitution.  I do not suppose that Habermas overlooks the complaints mentioned above, but he has no answer other than an idealised public sphere where individuals keep debating detached from anything which makes them individual.  

Of course there is much to admire in Habermas' thought and in German constitutionalism, but we need material interests and personal perspective in an adequate theory.  We certainly do not want a universalisation to German politics, mirroring the Jacobin universalism which Habernas criticises.  

Safari Browser for Windows might be better than Firefox 3

Safari for Windows can be downloaded from here Download Now Free for Mac and Windows

I've been arguing for the merits of Firefox as a browser, and particularly Firefox 3, beta 5.  This reflects my experience on Windows XP on a desktop PC.  I'm switching to Mac OS X Leopard on a MacBook (leaving aside office computers)  next month.  Friends who use Mac computers also use Firefox rather than the native browser, Safari.  I've tried out Safari since Apple released the Windows version, it is now on release 3.1.  Earlier versions impressed me with their aesthetics, but were very unstable, crashing and freezing at slight provocation.  I also found that the chat function had disappeared from my Gmail account.  

What is the situation now?  Gmail chat has disappeared on Firefox 3 beta 5, and I've had many problems with slow running and crashing.  Very likely my fault for not only using a beta version, but for doing things which made the browser perform worse: add the Night Tester extension which enables existing extensions on the browser that are not compatible with 3 beta 5 to become forcibly compatible.  I suspect also that Windows XP has difficulty running several applications, especially when one is an unstable browser on the 512 mb of ram (memory) I have at present, though that is standard.  Probably best to have 1 gb of ram if running several widgets, iTunes and a beta browser at the same time as I often do, and even more so if I'm running a sweep for spyware or viruses.  I do not see this as outrageous use of the computer.

I'm amazed to see that PCs are being marketed with 1 gb of ram for Vista premium.  Unless users stick to the Vista Basic limit of 2 programs at once, I'm sure they are plagued by slowness, freezing and crashing given that  2 gb is clearly minimal for Vista, and some reviewers claim that Vista is too slow even on that amount of ram.  

Back to browsers.  I've downloaded all the upgrades to Safari, and the last version, 3.1 is running beautifully.  No crashes or freezing, just some slowness which probably reflects the tendency of my 512  mb of ram to fill up all too easily.   

I was excited by the flexibility of Firefox, all those themes and extensions, and by the greater sense of aesthetic unity of the page in 3.  Safari does not give much  flexibility  or choice but it has a beautifully integrated aesthetic well beyond Firefox 3.  Like everything else from Apple everything feels seamless and gives you exactly what you need.  At first I was confused by the lack of restore closed tab option, but it can be done easily after clicking on History. At first I could not see how to close tabs, but go to File and the option is there, and I memorised control+w for that operation anyway.  Click on Develop and there are options to 'open page' with all the browsers I have loaded on the PC (Firefox, Opera and Explorer).  I was a bit startled by so many links opening in a new window, but right clicking on a link gives a speedy was to choose opening in a new tab or a new window and other options, including 'Inspect Element'.  It seems less happy with many tabs than Firefox, and opening new Windows causes less slowness than opening many tabs beyond those visible in the tab bar.  

Page loading is indicated by translucent blue bar spreading over url in address window, spell check comes in quickly and automatically.  A beautiful effect of curvature in three dimensions and 

Try it out. Download Now Free for Mac and Windows

I'll wait to try it out on my MacBook, and other browsers, properly when the Mac arrives.  So far I've just fiddled about on friends' Mac computers.  I'll also try out the following: 

Firefox 3 beta 5

Camino (a version of Firefox for the Mac OS which resembles Safari)

Opera

If I'm now finding Safari best for Windows, I guess I'll find it ever better for the Mac OS.  

Claims circulating the Web that PayPal will block Safari Browser are FALSE

The claim has gone round the web that Paypal will block Safari (Apple's browser for Mac computers and the iPhone which can also be used in a for Windows form) because they believe it does not have enough safeguards against pishing. This claim has been corrected by a PayPal executive. The reality with regard to Safari is that a padlock symbol appears on the the top bar of the Safari browser when entering a Secure site for a recognised merchant, and the lack of this icon when entering pishing site will alert the surfer as much as any other browser safeguards.

http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/04/18/paypal-bans-browsers-mac-love-cell-phone-bans/

Personas for Firefox. Go to link for great new Firefox application

Mozilla Labs » Featured Projects

The link above is for Personas for Firefox. This allows very easy modification of appearance of horizontal bars. Once the add on is installed, you can change themes without closing the browser. May work best on Firefox 3 beta versions, but is compatible with Firefox 2. If you still use Firefox 1, or don't use a Firefox browser and think 3 beta (beta is a test version) is too big a jump, download Firefox 2 from the side bar on this blog.