in Basel

Looks like a good conference shaping up. I’m giving the first lecture at the whole thing, which means I can then sit back and enjoy it.

foolish and reprehensible move by Romney

He is joined only by Sarah Palin in criticizing Obama’s handling of the attack. HERE.

Romney must really be panicking. Given his deserved reputation for having zero foreign policy experience, this is only going to make him look infantile.

Here is the reaction to Romney from other Republicans:

“They were just trying to score a cheap news cycle hit based on the embassy statement and now it’s just completely blown up,” said a very senior Republican foreign policy hand, who called the statement an “utter disaster” and a “Lehman moment” — a parallel to the moment when John McCain, amid the 2008 financial crisis, failed to come across as a steady leader.

“I guess we see now that it is because they’re incompetent at talking effectively about foreign policy,” said the Republican. “This is just unbelievable — when they decide to play on it they completely bungle it.”

“It’s bad,” said a former aide to Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “Just on a factual level that the statement was not a response but preceding, or one could make the case precipitating. And just calling it a ‘disgrace’ doesn’t really cut it. Not ready for prime time.”

A third Republican, a former Bush State Department official, told BuzzFeed, “It wasn’t presidential of Romney to go political immediately — a tragedy of this magnitude should be something the nation collectively grieves before politics enters the conversation.”

the U.S. Ambassador was killed in the Libya attack?

Absolutely and completely unacceptable.

President Mohammed Morsi, you must secure the area of the Embassy in Cairo if you want to be taken seriously as an international figure.

Embassies in Cairo must not be subject to mob action. I saw what a bunch of sour-grapes football fans did to the Algerian Embassy across the street from my home. It’s one thing to protest your own government, quite another to assault what is technically foreign soil.

nice cover!

Just picked up Latour’s new book on the modes of existence. The cover evokes each of the 14 modes.

Total length of the book= 494 pages.

If you prefer it in English, it should be available in eBook form in March or April, I am told. (From Harvard University Press, translated with no doubt consummate skill by Catherine Porter.)

tweets from the US Embassy in Cairo

I didn’t even realize they had a Twitter feed, because I’m so rarely on Twitter anyway. (I want to reduce rather than increase my time on the internet, and keep the Twitter account only because it’s so useful whenever something flares up in Egypt. The on-the-ground reports from Egyptian tweeps are always faster and more interesting than any news in the major media.)

Here are the last few English-language tweets from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.

US Embassy Cairo ‏@USEmbassyCairo
As Spokesperson Nuland said, protestors breached our wall and took down flag. Thanks for your concern and kind wishes

US Embassy Cairo ‏@USEmbassyCairo
Due to demonstrations, there will be no visa services tomorrow, Sept. 12.

US Embassy Cairo ‏@USEmbassyCairo
1) Thank you for your thoughts and prayers.

US Embassy Cairo ‏@USEmbassyCairo
2) Of course we condemn breaches of our compound, we’re the ones actually living through this.

US Embassy Cairo ‏@USEmbassyCairo
3) Sorry, but neither breaches of our compound or angry messages will dissuade us from defending freedom of speech AND criticizing bigotry

For some reason, a few tweeps have been complaining about these tweets. I see nothing to complain about, but do find them a bit weird.

I’m on the U.S. Embassy in Cairo mailing list, and their emails are generally so canned and so johnny-come-latelyish that I usually don’t make it through the first paragraph. But these tweets are different. They’re slightly (not very, but slightly) dramatic. They also have a strangely personal feel by the standards of institutional communication. You get the sense here that you always get on Twitter– that the US Embassy, like all tweeps, is on the verge of becoming a loose cannon and is even enjoying the fact that it might let down its guard and suddenly become a loose cannon.

So, who is the person at the Embassy making these tweets, and what is his/her rank?

There’s something slightly unnerving about the Embassy getting into the Twitter fray, and it reminds me that banality and predictability are what we expect from institutions.

Imagine that it went a step further, and the US Embassy tweep started dropping f-bombs and becoming openly confrontational with those who were complaining about the tweets. What would probably happen is that this would be classified (surely correctly) as some off-the-ranch individual going too far: we’d soon hear a statement saying “we regret these tweets, which do not reflect the official policy of the US government; the individual who made them is no longer an employee of the US government,” and so forth.

But let’s say that it went yet another step further, so that the Twitter culture of witty and confrontational one-liners began to influence the discourse of national governments (Iran already speaks in roughly this fashion anyway). Could national governments as we know them even survive under such conditions? I suspect not. Banality and canned remarks are part of what makes centralized power be centralized power.

Though I think that’s necessary, there are times when I regret it. There was some successful Mars mission or other during the Bill Clinton years, and you just wanted him to say “Wow!” Instead, he released a statement of soul-sucking banality, lacking in all human wonder.

Alternatively, maybe I’m wrong that large national governments can only survive by adopting a banal discourse. Often over the years, I’ve wondered what would happen if the United States began to adopt the same sort of heated rhetoric of many of its adversaries. What if the various “Great Satan” and “Imperialist Dog” accusations against the U.S. were responded to by some U.S. Department of Flame Wars? You could have Chris Rock and Bill Maher staffing the office, stuffing the digs back down the throats of Iran, North Korea, et al.

Yes, it would be childish and indecorous. But many things that we all do today were considered childish and indecorous in earlier decades. Is it possible that in 50 years our governments will be openly talking trash on our behalf?

arrest of Shafik ordered

HERE.

I figured that Ahmed Shafik probably had a good reason for remaining in self-imposed exile in Dubai (a number of my taxi drivers have been making fun of him for that lately). Now the failed Presidential candidate and final Mubarak Prime Minister is being charged with involvement in a shady real estate deal.

Of course I know nothing about the real estate transaction. But he could surely also be charged with Revolution-era misdeeds. There’s little chance that Shafik as Prime Minister had nothing to do with violent crackdowns on protestors. More than that, his Presidential campaign rhetoric openly celebrated the sort of military fascism seen during and after the Revolution.

The Brotherhood is tightening its grip on Egypt more rapidly than expected– for better and for worse. Both elements are present.

one of Egypt’s more disappointing moments

HERE.

There isn’t ever a good reason to attack an Embassy. No matter what. I said the same thing when I saw the Algerian Embassy in Cairo stoned in front of my eyes a few years ago (over the football-related issues), and said the same thing about Ecuador’s Embassy in London. Very disappointing that this happened.

Obviously there’s a bit of a culture clash here, since inflammatory religious speech is not protected in Egypt, but is treated legally as something beyond the pale of normal discourse. Even so, the Muslim Brotherhood’s call to “prosecute” the idiots and fools who made the anti-Islam film in the U.S. is ridiculous, even if they are idiots and fools.