Foreign Affairs
In a 2002 "letter to the American people," Bin Laden denounced America's sexual exploitation of women:
Your nation exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools, calling upon customers to purchase them. You plaster your naked daughters across billboards in order to sell a product without any shame. You have brainwashed your daughters into believing they are liberated by wearing revealing clothes, yet in reality all they have liberated is your sexual desire.
Rarely did I find cause to agree with Bin Laden - I didn't even agree with his likely appeal not to be shot in the head - but the bearded-one wasn't actually so far off on this particular observance. (NB:I didn't subscribe to his proposed solution to the problem.)
Yet it doesn't seem that the Turbaned Talibaner walked the walk. According to the New York Times:
The enormous cache of computer files taken from Osama bin Laden's compound contained a considerable quantity of pornographic videos.
Hardly the most strategically useful discovery, but illuminating nonetheless. The leaders of terror networks are never the one's strapping on suicide belts - that's reserved for the true-believers among the lower ranks. Just as leftists leaders love to redistribute other people's wealth to achieve social justice while fully enjoying their own lavish lifestyles, terrorist leaders spend other people's lives to oppose vices they fully enjoy in the privacy of their cave basements.
I suspect Bin Laden believed most of his shtick, but I don't mind taking just a few minutes out of my day to trample on his grave by pointing out the righteous leader was a hypocritical porn-monger.
Right, look if you pay attention, the middle east in crawling in mostly pirated porn, and hollywood movies. Technically America is not happy about this for two reasons. 1) the stuff is pirated in violation of Berne, meaning we get no money. 2) It provides a decent foundation for great satan type talk, along Sodom and Gomorrah lines. So in some sense his proposed solution was biblical self help. Some Imams consider Genesis to be a guide.
But as Larry Flynt points out, the biggest critics of porn are often times its consumers, or those who cannot evade it.
But I have also been thinking about how to do political science, and it has occured to me that we recur to this theme of "hypocrasy", but most of the time it is just an analytic device.
Does anyone bother to do a behavioral political science? That is, might folks not be the strongest advocates for what they consider to be good, but cannot pry themselves from, or undertake to do?
Recognition of a good one will not undertake under the current circumstances? A sort of self-knowledge as the grounds for lobbying government, to change the field, or dynamics of the market?
That is what if demand for government, and civic participation arises primarily from hypocrasy? I am pretty sure that the so called gap between the ethical principles people hold, and what they do in practice figures into the equation.
Hypocracy is a tremendous motivator, and properly understood not necessarily a violation of knowing ones self interest, even thought it complicates simpler analytic constructions, and makes it more difficult to rationalize the position in public, which ironically breeds a whole new level to hypocracy.
It seems entirely plausible to me that the Middle East is suffering a huge Hypocracy problem. With so much Hypocracy in the middle east, folks can not be sure that they wouldn't be better off under more radical or pure Islam.
So appreciating Hypocracy seems neglected in political science(especially the more economic sort, but also in blog commentary where it is an analytic device.)
Newt Gingrich 2012: Restoring Hypocracy.
Wow, NLT oscillates like a fan on the hypocrisy thing.
So, hypocrisy is now bad again?
At least until the next figure of the Christian right is caught with his porn stash...
"Just as leftists leaders love to redistribute other people's wealth to achieve social justice while fully enjoying their own lavish lifestyles, terrorist leaders spend other people's lives to oppose vices they fully enjoy in the privacy of their cave basements."
Good grief, what silly nonsense.
Judith Shklar has a fine essay on hypocrisy and politics in one of her books. It is a much over-estimated vice, especially by liberals.
This just goes to prove what I have believed all along about Islamic Terrorists. They are just a bunch of gang-bangers who followed a gang leader named Mohammed and try to sell their mental illness as a "religion".
You are awesome!
Meanwhile, in GOP Virtueland:
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/0514/Sen.-John-Ensign-sex-scandal-spreads-to-other-Republicans
Hypocrisy's a good thing, right?
Maybe hypocrisy should be the GOAL for family values conservatives.
I just squeal with delight over your awesomeness!