weighing in again, thanks to siraj ... look! 90+% of people world over are ignorant, irrespective of how intelligent or educated... most humans are so absorbed in their own micro worlds of social struggle, family problems, pleasure & escape that they hardly know anything about the objective world around them, much less about others except for stereotypes that make easy pigeon holing of "the other" whichever other happens to be the "other of the minute" flavour of the month target to put down .. of course this situation suits the real rulers of all societies, who continue to control by soft or hard means, keeping a reserve army of labour unemployed as a threat to employed workers ... geopolitics of diminishing natural resources, plays a key role ..
on this side (arabia --dubai -- where i live & work in an environment of global village 130 nationalities) the government controlled any demonstrations, allowing a token street march, but no banners, flag burning, etc., leaders urging moderation & making sure that local media carried that message .. but in general there is a difference between successful middle class professionals whether indian or brits, & the ignorant labouring masses who only know what they hear through their ethnic grapevines .. we are talking about people who have never been empowered, much like new orleans' black underclass .. for the past week i have been having discussions with my students, all girls in black cloaks & scarves, but dior - polo - levis & T's underneath ... we have come to an understanding that they know very little about their own country, ironically i know more general information than the lot put together .... even thought they have a depth of local knowledge invisible to me .. we then contrast this to what they know about other cultures ... zilch! so the analogy is what do they know about you? zilch as well. so if no one knows much about either self or other how can we blame lego & butter or government .. especially when teh press is all commercial enterprises trying to maximize profit & whatever sells ads or copies, is good, scandal being great for business ... we also looked at salman rushdie, an indian muslim with uk citizenship, living in new york, no fatwa was issued against india, uk or us, or even his publishers .. he alone was held responsible and because he was a muslim should have known better, but for some danish cartoonist with no knowledge of islam or responsibility toward it, how or why would we blame countries, peoples or dairy cows ... these 18 - 22 year olds from small cities & villages, understood & generally agreed that this was blown up out of proportion & that governments had no real control over commerce (media) & that the individual cartoonist was the person responsible & that he probably did not know that he was engaging in such a controversial act, but will profit from it with fame & maybe fortune ... jamil brownson uaeu - al ain, uae3 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
