Your site is very informational for me. Nice work.

Rubber Wristband

Very nice

Any Leftists or progressives who offer a real world, attainable and pragmatic perspective on the post 9/11 reality are preferable to disconnected idealists like Arunditi Roy.

Her simplistic take on the U.S.A. as essentially the evil empire pitted against the rest of the world is also destructive by any measure.

The world is much more complex than Arundati Roys’ Oz-like sense of reality.

Progressives who are willing to get their hands dirty wrestling with lifes’ real contradictions and complexities are much more likely to effect real change and bring real progress to the human condition rather than moral perfectionists like Roy.

Showcasing people engaged in a more pragmatic, hands-on progressivism will make a greater contribution, ultimately.

Phil Murray

Arundati Roy opposed the removal of the Taliban from power by U.S. and allied forces on ‘moral grounds’.
On ‘moral grounds’, rather than fight a war, Ms. Roy would have let the Taliban remain in power to:

1) Continue denying health care to millions of Afghan women (the Taliban forbade women from seeing male Doctors for a long list of medical problems– thereby sentencing countless 100’s of thousands more Afghan women to death by medical care exclusion).

2) Would have kept all Afghan women under the crushing weight of the Burkha for years to come.

3) Would have allowed Al Quaeda to continue to exist unmolested and at full power in Afghanistan.

Arandati Roy is a destructive idealist.

Morality without pragmatism is ultimately immoral.

Outcomes and consequences of positions of principle correctlty gauge the moral worth of such positions, not their internal ‘purity’ devoid of consequence in reality.

Arandati Roy (and many other disconnected idealists) would have let the Taliban rape Afghanistsan for another generation, rather than go to war to stop it.

Rather than ‘get dirty’ and do the imperfect thing with the far superior moral outcome:

That is– use military force to remove the Taliban, liberate Afghanistan and deliver a blow to Al Quaeda.

Arandati Roy, darling of the unrealistic faction of the Left, gets the limelight, while those who would get their hands dirty and even risk their own lives, get morally perfectionistic condemntation.

All of this in the upside-down fantasy world of Left perfectionists who yammer endlessly from their many perches in the American and British media.

As James said, essentially, elsewhere on this Blog…

…whatever happened to the REAL Left?

Phil Murray

Try Colby Cosh. He’s a Canadian who has a weblog. Instapundit has a link to him on the left sidebar.

What about Desmond Tutu? Global reconciliation.

May I suggest Mike Albert of Z Magazine and author of a new book called Parecon: Life after Capitalism? Albert would be an articulate voice representing the “anti-globalization” movement and could provide a positive progressive alternative vision and not just criticism.

“Anti-globalization activists understand that sympathetic and mutually beneficial global ties are good. But we want social and global ties to advance universal equity, solidarity, diversity, and self-management, not to subjugate ever-wider populations to an elite minority. We want to globalize equity not poverty, solidarity not anti-sociality, diversity not conformity, democracy not subordination, and ecological balance not suicidal rapaciousness.

Two questions arise. Why do these aspirations leave us critical of corporate globalization? And what new institutions do we propose for meeting these aspirations?”

http://www.parecon.org/writings/albert_for.htm

What about Jeremy Rifkin or Hernando de Soto?