next time in the U.S.

Late June.

Research. Visit family. Renew driver’s license. Attend, for the first time ever, a high school reunion.

My youngest brother was 5 years behind me, so he has a reunion too. Maybe even the same weekend as mine.

my gripe with Amr Moussa

Many people would like to see him as Egypt’s next President. And I did like his speech at our University last year.

But I don’t like the fact that he’s getting away with the following discrepancy, with few people calling him on it so far.

***

Amr Moussa on February 9 (just two days before Mubarak’s departure, after hundreds were already shot dead in the streets):

“‘I think President Mubarak should stay until his term expires,’ Moussa, who is also a former Egyptian diplomat, said in a televised interview with the local MENA news agency. He said an increasing number of people supported the idea.”

Amr Moussa on April 13:

“Presidential candidate Amr Moussa said Wednesday that the questioning of former president Hosni Mubarak and his two sons on charges of corruption and instigation against demonstrators of the January 25 Revolution ‘proves that nobody is above the law.'”

***

Sorry, but I find this shameless. What exactly did Mubarak do after February 9 to change Moussa’s mind? It seems to me that the damage had certainly already been done by then. And if you wanted to make the case at that point in time that he should either stay in power or at least be removed but not prosecuted, it’s a bit late to change that stance without explanation. But it looks like he’s getting away with it, and it’s always a thought-provoking moment (in the most interesting possible sense) when someone gets away with something that most people wouldn’t. These moments are not just cause for griping. They are also windows onto the uniqueness of a human character.

As I’ve said on this blog before, one of the key facts of ethics is that we never hold everyone to the same standards on every issue. And it’s pointless to make this the grounds for a fruitless and morbid reflection on human hypocrisy; we all suffer from it in some cases and benefit from it in others. Tell me what you get away with, and I will tell you who you are. Indeed, it is perhaps the primary fact of ethics. And it’s not just that the strong get away with things and the weak don’t. That’s sometimes true as well, but the weak also get away with things. (Besides which, no one is in a position of strength all the time or a position of weakness all the time.)

The point being… Moussa seems to be the type who will get away with this, just as Bill Clinton was the type to get away with pot-smoking/womanizing issues that could and did annihilate other candidates.

One of the points that results from this is as follows. Once you think you’ve figured out what someone’s “getting away with it” points are, on which they will always slide on through without significant punishment due to certain character features that make this possible, then there’s simply no point fighting them there. It will only be a frustrating energy loss. I once worked with someone who should have been fired 15 times over, but never was, and I wish I could get back the amount of time I wasted being outraged by his getting away with the things he did. Think of how much time Republicans wasted on painting Bill Clinton as a womanizer. No one cared! They should have realized much earlier that no one would care, in Clinton’s case. If Reagan or Obama had been getting favors from an intern in the Oval Office, they’d go down in disgrace in the history books, but no one will care that Clinton did it. That’s just the way it is. Clinton will lose on other fronts in unfair ways while the rest of us skate through on those points.

No one’s untouchable, but everyone’s untouchable in two or three ways, I think. Don’t fight anyone on their untouchable points, no matter how unfair it is.

in Tora prison

The Mubarak sons are now there as well. HERE.

If anyone ever held on for a few weeks too long, it was Egypt’s ex-President.

I’m not surprised to read that Gamal is “in total disbelief.” His life was in great shape as of mid-January, and now he’ll be left with nothing, perhaps not even with freedom of movement. It’s an astonishing fall for the whole group.

Bolivia and Mother Earth

“Bolivia is set to pass the world’s first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country’s rich mineral deposits as ‘blessings’ and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.

The country, which has been pilloried by the US and Britain in the UN climate talks for demanding steep carbon emission cuts, will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.”

Politically very refreshing, but I do have philosophical objections to the continued notion of nature as one pure realm and humans as another pure realm that should not taint one another with interaction. I’ve not yet heard an answer to Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, which had to be one of the most important philosophy books of the 1990’s. And it settled this particular dispute, as far as I’m concerned.

Nonetheless, Bolivia’s is a step in an interesting direction, and I’d like to see more ideas of this sort floated, if only for their provocation value.

And by the way… if “nature,” then why not animals? Why not “the right not to be slaughtered and eaten”? Otherwise, it seems as though nature is being defined as just a big loving human.

Ennis reposts Todtnauberg photos

In response to my posting the Lingis anecdote about Todtnauberg, Paull Ennis has reposted his LOVELY PHOTOS of the place.

I’ve never been up there, despite having been to Freiburg a number of times. I had always pictured it as such an isolated residential area that I didn’t want to stick out as an annoying intruder. But after reading the accounts by Ennis and the surprisingly non-annoying book Heidegger’s Hut</em> by Adam Sharr, I’ve changed my mind and will go there sometime. (I’m sure you’ll forgive me for assuming from the title and topic that Sharr’s book would be stomach-turning hagiography; it’s actually a charming little work from which one does gain a better sense of Heidegger the person.)

My first-ever trip to Germany was in summer 1989. No one knew that would be a big year for Eastern Europe and for Germany, so I was focused at the time on the fact that it was the Heidegger Centennial. I went to Freiburg on that trip, in the perfectly naive expectation that there would be huge commemorations of Heidegger in Freiburg all summer long. But I didn’t see anything with his name on it at all. In later years I became aware, from meeting countless German students who simply took it for granted that Adorno is a much more significant thinker, that Heidegger’s status in Germany remains much lower than it is in the Anglophone and Francophone worlds, among a few other worlds such as Japan.

another cheer for Philly

Free wifi in their airport. How about that? Exactly the way it would always be, in a rational world.

I have a vague memory of being in maybe one other airport where it’s free. Anyone know where? Probably it’s a lot more than one, but it’s rare enough to be worth noting.

Oxford, May 11

I’ll be speaking in the STS Seminar Series. (STS= Science, Technology, and Society for anyone who hasn’t heard the term.)

“Things and Practice.” Wednesday, May 11, 3 PM. James Martin Seminar Room. at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, located in the Said Business School.

For those who have never been to the Said Business School, at Oxford, it couldn’t possibly be closer to the Oxford train station.

CLICK HERE FOR MAP

I’ll be in Oxford for a week, but that’s the only public lecture. Will also be in London for a couple of days plus scraps.

Baltimore, plus a Heidegger anecdote

We crammed a lot into just a few hours in Baltimore: the Edgar A. Poe house and grave, the Visionary Art Museum, the aquarium, then the neighborhood over by Johns Hopkins. Long drive to Philadelphia in the rain coming up.

Any 10-hour discussion with Al Lingis means that you’ll hear dozens of interesting stories, but I thought I’d share the following reminiscence of Martin Heidegger, which I’d somehow never heard in my 20+ years of knowing Al. (He reads this blog sometimes, and can correct me if I heard any of this wrong.)

At some point in the early 1960’s, while at the end of his time at Duquesne, Al went over to Freiburg, having heard that Heidegger was still showing up for Eugen Fink’s seminar there. Upon arrival, he discovered that Heidegger was no longer doing this. (Fink’s seminar itself seems to have been a bit stuffy, filled with silent and reverential students.)

Then, Al somehow heard through the grapevine that Heidegger would be speaking in Todtnauberg (site of the famous hut) on the occasion of the 500th/600th anniversary of the first mention of Todtnauberg in a historical document something like that.

He says that Heidegger spoke brilliantly to an entirely local audience (the event had not been advertised in Freiburg), making numerous inside jokes about Todtnauberg incidents, and had the audience of locals roaring with laughter. But then he veered into full-blown Heideggerian philosophy, and the locals remained rapt with attention.

Afterward, Al went to photograph the Heidegger hut, and showed those slides in his classes for many years. But about 15 years later he happened to be in Todtnauberg at the same time as David Krell, who knows Heidegger geography well. And Krell told him that his photographs were of the wrong hut!