The Modernity Conspiracy

#39 scout, I guess you must be used to, seeing you you work(ed) for starbucks and must having seen this before, the concept of eating and having (or is having and eating) your cake.

This is a typical liberal lefty attitude. criticeise the very people who subsidise your lifestyle - that is leftism. This article exhibits a small variant of the same phenomena.

On one hand, you criticize the US education system for not being as scientifically or mathematically strong as in other countries.... on the other hand you criticize the very product of a scientifically strong education: modernity

Re: # 23
p.s. i apologize in advance for offending ms. siama because i know that women, regardless of their feminist pretensions and protestations, expect special consideration .............

not fair hamidm2 sahib (finger wagging icon). You can get away with such statements - because of your age. but young uns are not spared by the feminazis of chowk led by Miss Erudite, her bull dog Scout and few other hangers on!. You shul dbe hung drawn and quartered by these same women.


I ...ooops sorry, we call for satisfaction here

Re: # 34

nice idea, and lets collect some money to send them back to Saudi Arab, Pakistan, Afghanistan, or muslim country of their choice, where they can bring about Socialism or Khilafat.

Re: # 34
AIDS. Now that was creative.

#33
> your capitalism as doctrine whether of the past or the present cannot hold a candle to Islam given humanitarian criteria
Ques: why ?
Ans: because koran says so. [Isn`t it turly amazing :]

regards,
wiz0

``Is technology really a new Avatar, who moves among us and redeems us from strife, struggle and suffering?``(SS)

bv no means -- if it were -- then my country the United States -- the most advanced in technology -- would n`t have bestowed so strife and so much hi tech suffering upon the innocent bystander people of Iraq.....

masadi and Saima shah: people like you should form a club...

People in your club can be broadly divided into the following categories:

Islamists like masadi: America is doomed, regardless of the facts, because America is doing something the Islamists aren`t happy about.
Leftists like Saima Shah: America was pre-destined to be doomed because capitalism never works.
White-trash buchanan brigade types: America is doomed because of the damn foreigners and ``we`re exporting all our jobs``


you can call it the America Is Doomed Society(AIDS for short)..AIDS has no cure..

hamidm2 writes <<< ............ and yet the us continues to produce over 13tr in gdp and fdi continues to flow in at a 70-80B a year ?.............. this just doesn`t add up - how can a country inhabited by fat medicated half-wits continue to do so well ? >>>

By stealing from those ``fat medicated half wits`` and from the rest of the world. It is called neo colonization which is reflected within communities as well, internal colonization. In capitalism, blessed are the wealthy tyrants for they attain the heaven that such a system has to offer. The hardworking, the honest and the smartest fulifll their circumscribed roles and they drive to work keeping the same routine that is granted to them having no structural consequence on thier societies, similar to you driving your daughter and her `gaggle of gigglers` to this or that practice. The other suburbanites are doing the same, fulfilling their circumscribed roles, though they consider you a second rate wannabe, given your race and national origin, whether they admit it openly or not, those are the stereotypes they espouse, enough social research proves that regardless of the frequency with which you kiss GWB`s a$$.

hamidm2 <<< and if i needed more proof i don`t have to look further than the sandwich shop where i stop by to have lunch with bankers in their brooks brothers suits and illegal mexican landscape workers in grimy levis ........ the only difference i see is that the mexicans get the larger sandwich >>>

Only damn fools measure inequality in this fashion. While the mexicans return to their tiny apartments shared between five or six of them, your bankers return in many cases to their half a million dollar homes. There is life beyond the sandwich.

hamidm2 <<< ..... in case you don`t know, modernity is a state of mind, and capitalism is an economic system which is subject to change and not an ideology mired in the morass of the sixth century ....... >>>

No modernity is not merely a state of mind, it has physical indicators that are used as physical measures to guage the level of modernization of a society and the only change that has occurred in industrial capitalism is greater concentration of wealth and a bureaucratic management of global societies and of course there is an inhumane ideology that drives all these developments, an ideology which nurtures apartheid and racism on a global level. I don`t know what ideology you`re talking about when you mention the ``sixth century``, if you mean Islam you are atleast one century off and your capitalism as doctrine whether of the past or the present cannot hold a candle to Islam given humanitarian criteria.

another doozy and comfort workers in georgia :

... first, the doozy: ``The in vogue diseases of the postmodern world are ADD, depression and obesity. People seem to develop extremely low attention span in urban USA with an inability to concentrate. ``

............ and yet the us continues to produce over 13tr in gdp and fdi continues to flow in at a 70-80B a year ?.............. this just doesn`t add up - how can a country inhabited by fat medicated half-wits continue to do so well ?

....... but more importantly, if urban americans are fat, depressed and stupid, then why am i always driving my 13 year daughter and her gaggle of gigglers to this or that practice 4-5 days a week ? ...... okay, maybe it is because i live in the suburbs and the author is talking about the urban inner-city dwellers who are more representative of america ..........

.......... but the author does have a point : kia announced today that they are going to build a 1.2 billion dollar plant in westpoint, ga and will bring in 4000 korean men to assemble cars because the locals are too fat, too lazy and suffer from schizophrenia ............. local women will be hired as comfort workers ( toyota has protested this ``unfair trade practice) ...........

[ ... So, what is the modernity conspiracy?

A low subliminal buzz, a sort of ‘numbing’, a pressure to produce and consume, a tremendous feeling of uselessness and a continuous discontent ...]


And the alternative?

Most it explains, how far from reality and empericism live the Harvard type experts.

Cheerios

masadi mian,

...... i have no desire to `` address or refute even one point in any decent discussion`` - there are many other people more qualified than i who are doing it ............. but then i don`t need to refute any point either, because the fact that you and i are here, instead of in saudi arabia or zululand, offers irefutable evidence that modernity and capitalism work ..... in case you don`t know, modernity is a state of mind, and capitalism is an economic system which is subject to change and not an ideology mired in the morass of the sixth century .......

............... and if i needed more proof i don`t have to look further than the sandwich shop where i stop by to have lunch with bankers in their brooks brothers suits and illegal mexican landscape workers in grimy levis ........ the only difference i see is that the mexicans get the larger sandwich and load it up with jalapenos ......... i take that as evidence of utopian egalatarianism - ayaz and mahmood standing shoulder to shoulder in prayer is hokey hooey .....

Re: # 15

I think this assumption is a bit exaggerated. China’s modernization or rapid growth is somewhat similar to Singapore’s in the sense Singapore also had controlled political environment during it’s hyper growth period.

dude hamidm:
an islamist would find wealth of meanings by reading up on don delillo, michel houllebecq or the pet-favorite chomsky..though irony will be totally lost on them.. so you know.. :-)

aftre reading this artcile, I am convinced there should be some Islamic fatwah against non-sense writings and their writers. I am a bit ambigous about hanging such writers as penalty, but atleast we should make sure that these writers don`t hold the positions of publishers as well.

Unfortunately, for chowk and us, Saima Shah holds both positions here.

#23 hamidm2 writes <<< ........ it seems that in additon to becoming the ultimate refuge of the lazy, shiftless and insouciant desi code coolie, the chowk has also become the dumping ground for nostalgic communists who still pine for the good old days of marx, suicidal western educated mullahs who are bewildered by modernity, and confused management strategists who want to go back to the good old barter system of global trading as practiced by bedouin shepherds centuries ago ........... >>>>

Nothing ticks off the tyrannous friends of capital more than exposing the flimsy foundations of thier structure. Any article or lecture that does that bring out the sum total of their intellects: sloganeering and labelling and not much more.

They defend a structure that has robbed humanity of all humaness as it places everything remotely ``human`` in the marketplace to be offered to the highest bidder. Nothing bothers these damn fools more than exposing their system of ``equal opportunity`` as one that perpetuates inequality across the globe, and statistics like the gini index in the US that reveals almost near total inequality, and nothing brings out their slogans of ``communist`` and ``mullah`` faster than exposing the ``technology`` that they so tout, which by the way is being used first and foremost to destroy humanity and then transform the vast majority into a bunch of button pushing morons, who can`t think worth a dime.

This hamidm person is the ``technological idiot`` that C.W talked about, who cannot think for himself but prefers to follow the mythology of big capital even as it starves the world to death. He is an illiterate, whose reasoning abilities are limited to sloganeering and labelling. Go through his posts and you will notice that he cannot address or refute even one point in any decent discussion. I recommend ignoring his bs.