gold(en) rules' presentation

Ibn Battuta is writing his first post from Buenos Aires.
I'm about to rent the commercial property that will finance my journey.

What's the journey most important goal?
To help appreciate the great differences within Muslim world and
to strengthen mutual knowledge among people from different cultures and religions.
To highlight what we have in common without downplaying the differences that exists, something extremely dangerous.

I'll never shy away from clear value judgement , whenever there will be ground to sustain them.
No politically correct platitudes, no gratuitous provocation.
Too abstract and wordy? Here's an example:
What would have been my position in the Muhammad cartoons controversy of 2005?

Well, nobody can question the right of individual freedom, but our freedom ends where others people's freedom begins.
The Right is just one side of the coin.
The other being Duty. We are entitled of Rights only as long as we accept the responsibility for the Duties that comes with them.
The Right implies that nobody can prevent you from express any idea that you may feel crucially important(possibly not just to yourself but to your community as well)
Even if we now consider that Human Rights are Natural Rights, it does help to take a more broad historical view to the way in which our ancestors has obtained them.
That is by taking great personal risks fighting centuries of status quo.
We should really blush out of sheer shame whenever we invoke High Principles to justify petty actions.
This is not rocket science, just something that we should teach to our children very early. Hurting other people's (feelings) is bad. And we have to avoid it.
Since life is complicated we can face situations in which as Alessandro Manzoni wrote "non resta che far torto o patirlo"(we have to hurt or being hurt). The ancient Greeks did rationalize this painful process and create one of the most sublime form of art that western civilization have known, it's called tragedy.

Now, doesn't sound grotesquely inappropriate to use the best of our civilization to defend the rights of the authors and publishers of the vignettes.
of course any threat to their incolumity is unacceptable and grossly disproportionate to the offence.
The embarrassing "public debate" reached pretty soon the level of intellectual probity that you can expect in wartime and the necessity for assessing the "Principles of western individual liberties" vibrantly advocated.
We should never forget that so-called Principles have serve pretty well throughout history as a gimmick for chancelleries to induce war-prone sentiment in the public opinion.

I was born in 1975 and I haven't experienced wars from within.
Yugoslavia was close but as a foreigner I wasn't really exposed to the kind of nuances that I mean.
Karl Kraus in his review Die Fackel(The Torch), almost a blog ante-litteram, wrote some the best account of the kind of collective insanity that a war can provoke.


Back to the Blog presentation.
In my journey I'll pay special attention to the differences within Islam and even though I'll visit each and any countries where Muslims lives, I will privilege a reduced number of crucially important ones, namely: Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh and Indonesia.

The blog isn't about middle-east.
Middle east to me sound geopolitics. And geopolitics sound like "the-world-from-some-state-perspective". That's too much zero-sum-game for my taste!
It's about trying to understanding history in process of making by applying the widest variety of angles and lenses.
It's about trying to be honest and bias-aware.

Currently I'm building a network of people that I will ask for advise.
Academics, Religious leaders, Consultants, Journalist and Artists.
Gold(en) Rules entries will constitute a book in itself, although in the form of a pastiche of juxtaposed genres.

For the first period most of my writing will be dedicated to the current global crisis, although focused on long term trends and imbalances.
Since I'm not an economist it will be mostly an editing process of articles that I find stimulating with some open-ended questions, trying to make the most out of Paul Krugman's "dare-to-be-silly" attitude. I hope it will work also for an economic layman.

EU: Cultural Diversity - Welfare Spending Theme Park for the rest of the world?

José Ignacio Torreblanca from El Pais(spanish version) and ECFR(english version).

Abstract:
...It is no secret that China has also picked up on the weakness stemming from Europe's divisions, and like Russia for some time now, has begun to enjoy watching Europeans fight it out amongst themselves to see who can give more in exchange for less. Just last week, China decided to cancel the EU-Chinese Summit, a date of strategic importance for Europe at a time of severe economic crisis. Peking alleged that Sarkozy's meeting with the Dalai Lama amounts to a major slight on its sovereignty. The Chinese decision, however, is not just surprising, it is also absurd.

First of all, Sarkozy was invited to a meeting in Warsaw with Nobel Peace Prize winners, which obviously includes the Dalai Lama, the world leader with the highest approval ratings by the way. Secondly, no European country supports anything beyond talks between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese authorities which might lead to the concession of regional autonomy for Tibet, all of this in the context of an express renunciation of violence (in actual fact, not even the Dalai Lama is demanding Tibetan independence any longer). Worse still, the Chinese decision took place just a few days after the British government publicly announced a change in its traditional policy on Tibet, recognising it as forming part of Chinese territory, a volte face which comes in exchange for absolutely nothing, completely gratis. Once again, Peking's actions highlight just to what extent it loves flexing its muscles when it can, not when it wants, because Bush also received the Dalai Lama and yet no reprisals were adopted by China against Washington.

According to estimates by the consultancy Goldman Sachs, the Chinese economy will have caught up with Germany by 2010 and with Japan by 2015 (and indeed it has already caught up with Italy, France and Britain). Things look different if we consider Europe as a whole, because then China would not reach parity with the EU in economic terms, or the US for that matter, until 2035. You don't have to be very shrewd to work out that the US still has 25 years ahead in which to exert influence on China, whilst so long as it fails to act in unison, Europe lacks any kind of leeway altogether.

The analytical timeframe set by the Reflection Group on the future of the EU headed up by Felipe González stretches out to 2020-2025. The Group will have to present its findings during the Spanish Presidency of the EU, in the first half of 2010. The first question the Group should ask itself, and relay to European public opinion at large, is a very simple one: do you want Europe to be a relevant actor on the world stage in 2020? Or are you happy for it to simply be a cultural diversity - welfare spending theme park for the rest of the world?

IMF as a car insurance

Sebastian Mallaby made a good point comparing IMF with a car insurance:

“Car insurance makes driving possible by pooling the cost of crashes. If I had to pay out of pocket any time I had an accident, I might never get behind the wheel; I would want to have 80 grand in the bank in case I totaled someone's Mercedes. But since the number of expensive cars that get smashed is actually quite small, I can deal with this risk cheaply by sharing it with other drivers. We all pay $5 weekly into the Mercedes fund, and suddenly there's no need for vast sums in the bank. I'm so much better off that I'm visiting the Mercedes showroom“.

IbnBattuta here: Since we don´t lend them money in their currency(we would loose money in case of inflation - sound familiar?) and they don’t trust IMF and World bank anymore, they have decided that they need the 80 grand in their bank account. Can we blame them?

We have failed both on the stability side and on the poverty alleviation. Is anyone really shocked that they don't trust us anymore?