Since I'm a speciesist animal lover, I find most of PETA's philosophies about animal rights to be confused misplacements of ideas that evolved to increase the fitness of the human species. And so, while I might have fostered many dogs for many different shelters, I still count the needs of humans as priority number one and flinch more than a little when I find that 25 million dollars per year (PETA's annual budget) isn't being spent on, say, anti-genocide campaigning in Darfur or AIDS relief in Africa. But let's leave aside philosophical quarrels for a second and assume for a moment that it is unproblematic to devote massive amounts of human energies and resources to the cause of animal rights even if it by necessity neglects other human issues. What should it tell us when we hear that PETA may make Michael Vick a spokesperson for animal rights?

PETA comes under a great deal of fire even from fellow animal rights activists for their tactics, which many feel are more show than service. The currently airing HBO documentary on PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk shows several organizations disagreeing with her attention whoring, which they feel gives a bad name to the overall endeavor of ending cruelty to animals. Now that Michael Vick has taken a course in empathy for animals, PETA is considering using him in one of their commercials (no word yet as to whether Vick will be wearing any clothes):

Now, PETA's propensity to sell their message with sex has always just been a bit silly. It wasn't until they compared animals caged for slaughter to those killed in Nazi concentration camps that I surmised they were absolute opportunist nutjobs whose ideas about morality deserved zero hearing (an opinion only reinforced by the discovery that Newkirk has written checks out to people who torch university laboratories). According to PETA's equivalencies, then, a neo-Nazi skinhead who only a few months ago was convicted of beating a Jewish man to death would, after a sensitivity course, be a reasonable candidate for speaking out against anti-Semitism and hate crimes.

But chances are, not many PETA members would agree with this--maybe not even Newkirk herself. If they don't, it exposes the conceptual fallacy in their Holocaust ads, and, in a way, the practical confusion of the overarching PETA mentality--that non-human life is worthy of reverence and consideration equal to that which we afford humans. While it may be true that one guilty of a crime can have a more intimate experience with its evil and thus a deeper understanding of why it is wrong, it is equally as true that most humans experience a visceral and deep feeling of repulsion for those guilty of murdering their own. Nobody wants to see sexually depraved child murderers doing PSAs on the dangers of internet chatting for minors.

If Vick wants to try to salvage his career by speaking out against dogfighting on behalf of PETA, that's fine by me. What he did was disgusting and we should hope that our societies keep a check on people who increase the suffering of living things for purely recreational purposes. But we should enjoy PETA's hypocrisy here, as it simply helps to show why we should punish people like Vick, while recognizing their crimes are not equal to the killers of humans--precisely because we know that humans have a tendency to see themselves in other living organisms (especially those that have some similar features like eyes noses, etc.). But the main reason this should concern us is because we know that people who don't make this essential connection might fail to make it in the case of our fellow humans.

When people like the David Horowitz get huffy about the state of higher education, this is the sort of thing they are talking about. I'm no fan of Horowitz, but in some capacity his claim that a left orthodoxy dominates certain realms of academia is entirely true. Now, if an intellectual defense of FGM was going to come from any department of the academy, you knew it would come from anthropology. I once asked an anthropologist a pointed question about her experience in the field as an ethnographer and teacher. "Is it possible," I wanted to know, "to practice the scientific study of humanity if you do not subscribe to cultural relativism?" Appearing not to really want to say so, she eventually and reluctantly answered in the negative. I went on to ask her if it would be possible to be taken seriously within the discipline as an academic who understood but did not necessarily subscribe to the philosophy of Michel Foucault. Again, she seemed troubled. It would be difficult, she said, but she supposed it could be done. I remember being almost frightened of the amount of imagination she seemed to have to muster in order to picture the serious 21st century anti-Foucauldian anthropologist.

So let's be clear from the start--the discipline informing the arguments against anti-FGM campaigns on the basis that anti-FGM advocates are imposing their values on indigenous peoples is itself almost wholeheartedly committed not only to cultural relativism (which is in no way not a value-free stance)--it is also deeply informed by one late 20th century thinker whose ideas were sometimes interesting, often tendentious, and at worst outright politicized apology for pederasty and Khomeinism. So why shouldn't we discourage the practice of female circumcision? According to Fuambai Ahmadu, an anthropologist who has undergone her own genital cutting (as she euphemistically describes it)

...women who uphold these rituals do so because they want to — they relish the supernatural powers of their ritual leaders over against men in society, and they embrace the legitimacy of female authority and particularly the authority of their mothers and grandmothers.

Upon reading some of her work, I discovered that Ahmadu doesn't think very highly of Susan Moller-Okin's excellent essay Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women? I think I know why.Moller-Okin's basic insight is that when defenders of this amorphous abstraction 'culture' utter the word, it is almost always too unspecific. Can it be said that every girl who is to experience FGM is looking forward to it, eager to experience this particular kind of "feminine empowerment?" Of course not. So what of their particular 'culture'--the culture of the girls who don't want to get cut? How is it that the admitted "authority" of the mothers and grandmothers is afforded preference? Obviously Ahmadu has some value for self-determination if she wants us to respect that of one or another culture. But the case can be made that she is arguing for the respect of one over another--the elder females over the younger females who, if they want to experience this supposed ecstasy, probably only think of it as ecstasy because they've been taught that's what it is. If culture and indoctrination can make millions of people think of an image of a crucified man is a symbol of peace and hope, then let's be frank--it can make anybody think anything awful is lovely.

This issue is only one among many that exemplify this basic disagreement within the intelligentsia. And we can't be so quick to say that what ivory tower intellectuals say to one another is of little relevance to the world outside the tower. One need only look at Michel Foucault's attitude toward the Islamist element of the Iranian Revolution and subsequent attitudes to Islamism in the wider culture to understand that these ideas trickle down into the wider world. Horowitz's conservative campaign against liberals in education isn't what's needed. What is needed is the reinstatement of the search for knowledge and the eschewing of relativistic Foucauldian indoctrination into a discipline that's supposed to be telling us about ourselves presumably so we can make the best ethical and value judgments based on the best information. When all we hear is that such judgments must be suspended or understood as imperialistic, one must wonder what fruits anthropologists hope their work will bear.

Looking back on this era of history, the gravest threat of the hour will probably not be understood to be Islamic extremism or Western neoliberalism, or whatever one's preferred party-fashionable bogeyman might be. It will likely be certain strains of Western philosophy.

Ian Buruma and Paul Berman have been among the most prominent figures who have tried to show the connection between Islamic radicalism and it's having absorbed ideas from European thinkers, although Stephen Schwartz has out-muscled both of them in his explication of the historical and ideological debt that modern Islamic radicalism owes to that infamous people of the Najd. Islamism doesn't stand a chance in the long run because depraved nihilistic movements always burn themselves out. The question is only how much ground they'll gain and how much damage they'll do before then (no small matter in view of the power of 21st century weapons technology). The ears their claims fall upon and the responses of the societies they attack and wish to destroy play a large part in determining the course of events. As one can quickly gather from reading Anja Havedal's review of Afghan Women by Elaheh Rostami-Povey in this month's issue of Democratiya, the particular Western incarnations of philosophy that inform certain current understandings of multiculturalism are poisoning "Western" minds just as much as the screeds of kaffir beheaders are infecting the minds of Muslims.

According to Havedal, Rostami-Povey thinks that just about every effort to help women in Afghanistan is a failure and/or a ploy disguising colonialist arrogance and avarice in the cloak of rights and freedom. But what's nonsense in all the talk about us and them, Western and non, is that while Elaheh Rostami-Povey claims that "an alien imperialist culture and prefabricated identity wrapped in the rhetoric of 'security, development, women's liberation and democracy' has [sic] been imposed on Afghan women and men alike" she herself speaks as one educated in the halls of British academe. Her CV is impressive: a BSc in Applied Economics (University of East London), an MA in Agrarian Studies (University of Sussex), and a PhD from the Open University. According to Rostami-Povey's view of things, she is herself imposing the philosophical insights of Western thinkers on Afghan women.

Culture is a notion that only has meaning through alienation or distance from one's way of life--the kind of alienation experienced in modern multicultural societies. Much widespread understanding of the moral evils of imperialism derive from the European-American experience of having been imperialists. The critique of imperialism most preferred by academics to this day was hatched by a German Jew steeped in the work of the monumental German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. So when Rostami-Povey mounts her high horse of anti-imperialism and cultural preservation, shall we accuse her of making Afghan women Hegelians or Marxians? Individualistic self-determination, one could argue, is decidedly a product of European political philosophy, and the modern understanding of authenticity from Trilling to Taylor is American and Canadian, respectively. Isn't Rostami-Povey's argument just an imposition of a tapestry of "Western" ideas?

One doubts that she would welcome this critique. Certainly Rostami-Povey believes that Afghan women deserve a certain quality of life that is universally appreciated by our species. Freedom from war, loss, starvation, coercion, and suffering. This was precisely the political project from Hobbes onward, to see that humans improve their lot beyond the short, brutish one it has potential to be. But was Hobbes unique? Muhammad was himself a sort of political philosopher and conflict resolver proposing a way of organizing life both personal and political so that suffering might be decreased and goodwill promoted. More likely, these figures spoke in different places to the same need.

But Afghanistan is one of the most recently converted majority Muslim countries in what can only rightly be described as an Islamic empire. Prior to the arrival of Islam, and in many ways even after, Afghans adhered to centuries-old patriarchal tribal traditions. So when Rostami-Povey insists that Afghan women should be allowed to " struggle against local male domination in their own way and according to their culture," to which 'culture' can she possibly be referring if she hopes to maintain an ethic of anti-imperialism and women's rights?

People like Rostami-Povey must decide whether they believe it is a universal good that women be free and persons have a right to self-determination. If she does, then she must also accept that Western philosophers' ideas were not ethnically bounded, but considerations of human beings attempting to create what used top be called in less relativistic times "the good life." Those ideas are no more culturally specific than is the basic need to live free of the horror that Afghan women have been experiencing for centuries under male, Soviet or Islamist domination. Instead, she suffers from the cancer in Western philosophy--the popularization of two absurd notions in particular. One, that the preservation of culture is an end in itself, even if that culture espouses ideas that are inimical to the good life; and two, that quest for the good life is a conceit to be replaced by instating the regime relative values. That regime is, by Rostami-Povey's standards, a German (read: Nietzschian) one. I prefer to say it's just a bad idea.

Her system of designations is undesirable. That regime is, according to the standards of anyone interested in bettering of the lives of others, at best a hindrance and at worst a recipe for the kind of liberal nihilism, despair and self-hatred that will say when thousands of its countrymen die at the hands of illiberal murderers, 'We deserve it.' But in Afghanistan, it makes the best the enemy of the good, positing failure due to the 'self interest' part of enlightened self interest. It declares the messy business of aid a fiasco where there are instead some lives improving, even if not all at the rate and to the degree that Rostami-Povey--and any decent person, I might add--would like to see.

If Nick Cohen sounds like he's on autopilot in this recent Comment is Free piece, it might be because the forces he's railing against are too. If your adversary repeatedly swings at you from the left, it's best to keep repeatedly blocking from the left. You'd think more liberals would welcome him after having witnessed so many of the disastrous consequences of the George W. right hook against radical Islam. But that's Cohen's point--he's speaking to and about those who don't intone any desire for a leftist ally against reactionaries, since they don't feel any troubling disparity between their notions of social justice and those of jihadis.

The aesthetic appeal of radical sounding arguments and their simulacra of intrigue can be dangerous and it takes somebody like Cohen to keep reminding us, every time a Garton Ash has an exchange with a Hirsi Ali, or an Amis with an Eagleton, we need to keep our ears open because these encounters will tell us where we stand in our ongoing quest for enlightenment, truth, justice and all the other things you aren't supposed to say without a wink of irony or a couched disposition. And if every single time these exchanges go down, some decorated posterchild for liberalism again reveals their lack of distaste for reactionary, violent extremist religious cults, somebody must keep saying so.

The issue Cohen raises here is of interest in particular because of the question regarding over whom, how much, and whether Hirsi Ali has any influence given what some perceive to be her brashness, disrespect, and inflexibility.

"...he stuck to the argument that there was no point in liberals treating her as a heroine because her abandonment of Islam and embrace of atheism meant her arguments carried no weight with Muslims. Instead he told us to encourage those Muslims who reject the stoning of women because they dispute its scriptural authority. Religious debates about whether the Prophet Muhammad really approved of stoning may be 'gobbledegook', but, he cried, 'We must support gobbledegook that is compatible with liberal democracy."

Ash sounds like he knows his Enlightenment history well, the story of how God was removed from politics in the language of Christian scripture. But to listen to him you'd gather that nobody needs a Voltaire just as long as there are Lockes and Rousseaus. I'd beg to differ. Do the multiculturalists really want to say that Muslims only understand the language of religious doublespeak (sometimes referred to a liberal theology)?

Have folks like Ash forgotten what religious inculcation is for children? A rigorous program of deflecting and redirecting their rational questions about the belief system into which they are being initiated. In other words, most kids know its silly from the get-go. "Enlightenment fundamentalists" are forcefully reasserting something almost all religious people knew as children and still intuit deep down--that it really is a big scam. For some, this loud affirmation of their doubts will be precisely what is needed to free them from the superstitions that enslave them. Of course there is a link between Hirsi Ali's courage and her transformation. It requires more guts to reject outright the cherished illusions of your culture and family. One can expect those who do so to be equally as courageous when enter the public sphere, equally demanding of the recognition of truth and the rejection of ' gobbledegook' at whatever cost.

In a perfect world, more tongues than you could count would be angrily flapping upon hearing that a respected man of avowed liberal persuasion spoke out in defense of gobbledegook. Kids know better. If anybody deserves condescension at this point in the game, it's precisely those who are currently doling it out.

Arianna Huffington wants to help the Democrats. How best to do this? For a start, she enlisted "multiple-award-winning ad exec Rich Silverstein," the man who gave us 'Got Milk?' starring a bunch of celebrities with pseudo-pornographic splish-splashes on their mouths, to come up with this doozy of a "visual blog." The idea is to "help the Democrats, who continue to struggle with framing an election where they are holding all the cards." It isn't hard to guess what popped into Silverstein's head, but since the eminently self-loving Not In Our Name group already appropriated 'Got Democracy?,' he at least had to do a little bit of brain work. He came up with something that holds to the autopolitic theme: 3 hot money shots for masturbatory liberals.

 These posters illustrate nicely both the nuance commonly found in the dominating mindset of American Democrats almost as well as they illustrate how the internet paradigm is negatively impacting political thought. Never we mind that influential people are looking to advertisers, the most sleazily manipulative, dirty capitalist douchebags on the planet for their "grasp of what makes for effective communication in radio, movies, TV, and online." This in itself is, of course, an instant compromise of principle to anyone claiming even remotely left/liberal credentials. But what's worse, everything here is a shortcut--as if they were a slew of mentally hyperlinked keywords, each of which leads to the same page: 'EVIL' in big, bold-faced lettering. If I could respond to this visually, I might make a poster that says in the middle 'Bush & Co. Sux. DUH.'

I've written here, as have many of my colleagues, regarding the detestable and even impeachable offenses committed by several of the folks who appear on the 'NAMES' roster. But how is it that Paul Bremer and George Tenet got such small-time billing compared to Harriet Miers? If this is visual communication of such a high order, then are we really to understand that the President's failed cronyist appointment of Mrs. Miers was more sinister than the criminal errors of the CIA and the mismanagement of the occupation of Iraq? And why, if we agree that Bush's Texanochristianity is a problem, would one chide him for the way his administration has handled Intelligent Design while simultaneously mocking the rhetoric he deploys in waging a war against people who enforce a variation of that theory by means of indiscriminate murder?

The 'SLOGANS' poster is by far the most problematic. The red flags these black words are intended to throw up in the minds of their audience exist for one reason alone: they were uttered by one or another Bush Jr. era Republican. So what happens when those words happen to be 'A Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism?' How is it that Democrats, liberals and leftists find themselves scoffing? Or 'Stay the Course' for that matter...many rightly ask if there could have been a 9/11 had we 'stayed the course' in Afghanistan instead of abandoning Afghans to a decade of civil war and eventual Islamist totalitarianism. If we had stayed the course in 1991, and not 'Cut and Run' the list of likely outcomes would be hard to escape. Saddam Hussein wouldn't have had the ability to torture his people another twelve years, nor would the United States have had to face the wrath of a people who weren't impressed with it's "liberation" skills the first time around (you know, when Bush called for Iraqis to rise up and overthrow the regime, then stood by and did nothing while gunships mowed men down in the thousands).

The 'EVENTS' installment manages to avoid many of the trappings of the other two. It's a heinous laundry list that should make any decent person ashamed to be American. It is indeed time for a drastic change in the way our leaders manage our affairs. But if Blackwater, armorless soldiers, and ID crusades didn't bother you enough already, writing down words in scary block letters and stuffing them on a poster isn't going to do much. Or rather, if it does, we have an even larger problem. Such convictions, brought to you by the Got Milk? guy are hardly enough to sustain genuine, overarching social changes. Huffington and Silverstein aren't currently doing anything more than giving a complacent liberal majority the chance to jerk themselves off.