In Memoriam – Tony Judt
Tony Judt just passed after a two year battle with ALS.
Mr. Judt (pronounced Jutt), who was British by birth and education but who taught at American universities for most of his career, began as a specialist in postwar French intellectual history, and for much of his life he embodied the idea of the French-style engaged intellectual.An impassioned left-wing Zionist as a teenager, he shed his faith in agrarian socialism and Marxism early on and became, as he put it, a “universalist social democrat” with a deep suspicion of left-wing ideologues, identity politics and the emerging role of the United States as the world’s sole superpower.
His developing interest in Europe as a whole, including the states of the former Eastern Bloc, led him to take an active role in the developing Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia; it culminated in “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945” (2005), a sweeping, richly detailed survey embracing countries from Britain to the Balkans that, in the words of one reviewer, has “the pace of a thriller and the scope of an encyclopedia.”
Mr. Judt was perhaps best known for his essays on politics and current affairs in journals like The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books . . .
“Today I’m regarded outside New York University as a looney tunes leftie self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university I’m regarded as a typical old-fashioned white male liberal elitist,” he told The Guardian of London in January 2010. “I like that. I’m on the edge of both, it makes me feel comfortable.”
He’ll be missed. Here’s a column exploring his last minute race against time to complete his work.
Why Does Obama Hate Privacy?
Facebook’s much publicized user privacy meltdown is just the lastest example of massive social web services disregarding users’ privacy. Google similarly decided on its own all its users’ private information should by default be visible to any one. Despite the CW that ‘no one expects privacy’ anymore, anti-Facebook sentiment runs white hot. The query ‘how do I remove my Facebook account’ is now among the most popular searches on the web. Expectations of privacy are not quite dead.
Now imagine what happens in other less closely watched situations with all of our information. When it’s more than exposing private messages explaining how one’s spouse is a jerk. You know, involving little things like the 4th Amendment, FISA, etc. Yup, the Feds. (And if the Feds walk all over your privacy, do you really think something like HIPPA stops an insurance company?)
So what gives with Obama’s intransigent disregard of a 2007 law requiring him to appoint members to a privacy panel? The panel’s origins lie back in the dim recess of time when intelligence reform was given at least nominal jaw-jaw. Alas, if the panel was actually set up? McConnell might write an angry letter. And November is coming up. It’s not like intelligence reform, oversight, the 4th Amendment and privacy are important. Just ask Kagan – she has no opinion on them.
Who knew ‘hope and change’ had a sell by date of February 2009?
Utah Tea Baggers Eat Bennett
Not even crocodile tears. The tea baggers run amuck with the conch and exile Bennett. Mitt’s sermon is ignored. Utah goes ‘Lord of the Flies.’ We didn’t mind Bennett as a person. Gentle, courtly, polite. He always seemed slightly out of place in the Republican Senate Caucus under and after the Warlord.
But he earned his hard core right wing voting record. Worse, many of his jingoistic staffers went on to infect various lobbying organizations, executive positions. Bennett may be gone but *they* remain an intolerant, judgmental Rightist bacillus that infect this town (and prosper) with Boy King trumphant.
Bennett’s never been a social gadfly and part of the D.C. media circle jerk daisy chain. So his personal defenestration will be analyzed in the days ahead in more clinical, facile terms. Permanent Washington will mourn . . . in the press. Everyone is more concerned what it means for their own rear end.
Values Movement activists continue to loathe the libertarian Tea Partiers, Grover’s Wednesdays Meetings, Armey, etc. But expedience requires biting their tongues in public. They draw greater satisfaction at results: the Tea Party suppression of the Warsaw Moderate Uprising. First Snarlin’ Arlen chased out, then Crist. Now Bennett. But mark these words, Dear Readers, the Values Movement are merely sitting on the sidelines. They tell the Stiftung they look forward to putting the motely band of ‘libertarians’ and disaffected ‘Stalinist-Progressive-Democrats’ in their place. And the Rightist Catholics at least remember the 30 Years War.
Dear Newsweek, Welcome To The Real World
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