Published in Viewpoint, October 22, 2010 It is no secret that the right wing pundits and politicians in the United States have always used simplistic and reductive framing of issues to appeal to the emotions and fears of the American…
Tag Archive for Conservatism
The Incompatiblity of Conservatism and Humanities
by Masood Raja •
The Laughable Certitude of Foundational Intellectuals: The Case of Professor Christine Fair and the Drones
by Masood Raja •
In a recent TV interview, Professor Christine Fair, Georgetown University, made the following unfair (I can’t resist the pun here) statement in response to another expert’s views, contrary to hers, on the question of US drone attacks in Pakistan…
Auctoritas, Potestas, and the Talibanistic Imaginary (Part 6)
by Masood Raja •
It is no wonder, then, that the Taliban rule in Afghanistan is inextricably linked with a permanent state of iustitium as the country, for so many reasons, was and is in a perpetual tumult. Furthermore, since the Taliban had mobilized…
Auctoritas, Potestas, and the Talibanistic Imaginary (Part 5)
by Masood Raja •
The rise of the Taliban cannot just be attributed to the Qur’an and the Islamic texts, for after all these texts had been there for centuries without spawning something such as the Taliban. The rise of the Taliban is inherently…
Auctoritas, Potestas, and the Talibanistic Imaginary (Part 4)
by Masood Raja •
First, a brief explanation of what I mean by Talibanistic imaginary. Talibanistic imaginary is a worldview constructed within modernity, is shaped by the material, cultural, and political conditions, and relies on a literalist, reductive, and exclusionary definition of tradition. A…
Thoughts on Talibanistic Imagination
by Masood Raja •
Space is the ultimate subterfuge for the metropolitan cultures as it allows transporting Talibanization to the outer fringes of the metropolitan world. This exercise absolves the metropolitan of any fundamentalist tendencies while also ascribes all such movements to the global…
The Myth of Individualism and American Conservatism of the Far Right
by Masood Raja •
Having heard and watched various actions of the so-called Tea party Movement and the Republican leaders trying to tap into this movement for the next election, I could not help but notice some drastic inconsistencies in their self-presentation. What we…