'the age of Arab-Muslim exceptionalism is over...'

http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2011/02/egypt-arab-tunisia-islamic

Olivier Roy on Egypt and Tunisia.

The Arab uprisings: Three tentative conclusions

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/MB23Ae01.html

1. The domino theory is not always wrong
2. The medium is not the message 
3. The secular should not be discounted 

Egypt: Not 'transition', but Class Struggle

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/hanieh140211.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter


"The result of neoliberalism was the enrichment of a tiny elite concurrent with the immiseration of the vast majority.  This is not an aberration of the system -- a kind of 'crony capitalism' as some financial commentators have described it -- but precisely a normal feature of capitalist accumulation replicated across the world.  The repressive apparatus of the Egyptian state was aimed at ensuring that the lid was kept on any social discontent arising from these worsening conditions."

Reading & the Reader

http://chronicle.com/article/Narcissus-Regards-a-Book/126060/

"Reading in pursuit of influence—that, I think, is the desired thing. It takes a strange mixture of humility and confidence to do as much. Suppose one reads anxious about not being influenced. To do so is to admit that one is imperfect, searching, unfinished ...

"... What Narcissus wanted was completion, wholeness; he wanted to be that image in the water and have done with it. There would be no more time, no more change, no more revision. To be willing to be influenced, even up to the last, is tantamount to declaring that we'll never be perfect, never see as gods see—even that we don't know who and what we

"The desire to be influenced is always bound up with some measure of self-dislike, or at least with a dose of discontent. While the culture tells us to love ourselves as we are—or as we will be after we've acquired the proper products and services—the true common reader does not find himself adequate at all. He looks in the mirror of his own consciousness, and he is anything but pleased ...  where is this common reader ... who is both confident and humble, both ready to change and skeptical of all easy remedies?"