MetaFilter posts tagged with globalism

It's Tuesday

chuckdarwin — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 05:15:38 -0800

Martin Amis on 9/11 and the cult of death:

"Let us briefly trundle through the argument for moral equivalence, and let us begin with a trio of ascertainable truths. First, the years 1947 and 1948 saw two imperialistic decisions that guaranteed an increase in hostility between Muslim and nonMuslim: the partition of India along religious lines, and the establishment of the state of Israel. (These decisions also led to, but did not invent, murderous hostility between Muslim and Muslim – in East Pakistan, in Gaza). Second, throughout the 1970s the Arab regimes sponsored by the US started to head off political dissent by guiding the opposition towards Islamic fundamentalism. And, third, in the 1980s the US backed the Mujahidin against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and also helped to fund the Pakistani madrassas, whose graduates (all of them unemployable zealots) increased from 30,000 in 1987 to well over half a million by 2001. Thereafter, or so the equivalence argument goes, the Islamist vanguard, having wearied of seeing the battles fought exclusively on its own soil, visited a taste of this destruction on the West. Which turns out to suit the neocons and Christian Zionists, who can now place the US under military rule while they prepare their push for Islamic oil and for Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. The goals of the so-called “terrorists” (who are merely responding in kind to state terrorism from the US and its clients) are not delusive or messianic but solemnly political. So it has always been: the oppressed struggle against the oppressor; the wrongs of the past rise up to avenge themselves on the present."

Put your money in oil shale production

Kickstart70 — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 18:55:00 -0800

This Israeli process could turn the gigantic oil shale deposits of the US into the largest energy production in the world, outstripping the Middle East's role and dramatically altering the world economy to be even MORE US-centric.

Landscapes Of The Jihad

y2karl — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:27:12 -0800

...With the end of the cold war and the emergence of global networks in which goods, ideas and people circulate outside the language of citizenship, the fundamentalist fight for ideological states has lost influence... Muslim radicalism, by contrast, has moved beyond the language of citizenship to assume a global countenance, joining movements as different as environmentalism and pacifism in its pursuit of justice on a worldwide scale. Such movements are ethical rather than political in nature: they can neither predict nor control the global consequences of their actions...

Spectral brothers: al-Qaida’s world wide web
Snapshots of Faisal Devji's Landscapes of the Jihad are to be seen within

A crash course in Venezuelan history

jefgodesky — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 08:25:13 -0800

Hugo Chávez is crazy! Hugo Chávez is certainly making a lot of news these days. No doubt we'll find the truth somewhere between "evil dictator" and "third world savior," but the long, dark history of U.S. involvement in Latin America casts suspicion on everything. Chávez is gaining a heroic light in the third world for "standing up to" the United States. He's making friends with Cuba, China and Iran. Is Chávez heading up a new rogues' gallery ... or gearing up for the resource wars?
Previous MetaFilter coverage: [1,2,3,4]

owillis — Wed, 02 Jan 2002 14:32:00 -0800

Emancipator or Oppressor? E.J. Dionne talks about how the global economy may not be as evil or as good as its respective supporters and detractors make it out to be. It seems like a pretty balanced look at a subject that gets horribly slanted coverage.

Georgina — Tue, 27 Feb 2001 18:26:16 -0800

eBay takes a leaf out of eToys' book. Everybody's favourite auction site is threatening legal action against EBay Pty Limited, an Australian company that’s been around for twenty years but only got online recently. eBay has the ebay.com.au domain name, so EBay bought ebayaust.com in late 1999 for their small business selling self-published books.

Now eBay wants EBay to stop using the name both online and offline, the latter of which seems highly dubious given the relative ages of the companies.

In what is becoming an increasingly global marketplace, where do we draw the line between disparate companies with similar names?