Can #occupyWallStreet make a real difference?

As the Occupy Wall Street movement grows and enhances other occupy movements in the United States (occupy Boston, etc) and in the world (as far as in Japan, Taiwan), I was remembering a note I wrote on May 2011 called To all the Tahrir Squares in the World where I was saying that with the Spanish Indignados unrest movement inspired by the Tunisian/Egyptian revolutions, we are seeing the beginning of a global phenomenon spreading much beyond the Arab World. Everywhere, the same basic demand: asking for a fairer world.

As a citizen of the world, there is one thing I always admired in Americans: their talent in putting the right words on things. In french we would say they have le sens de la formule, meaning ‘the sense of the right formula/sentence’. I don’t know who said first ‘We are the 99%’ , but I think it sums it up perfectly.

The ‘occupy’ movements demands are noble, they are right. But can they make a real difference? After all, the spanish Indignados movement did not result in reforms or change in the state of the things in Spain. The Greek protests did not prevent the new rules of the game dictated by the CEB and IMF. Things just carry on like they were, except for the traffic jam caused by the protests. If it is true these movements have raised the awareness in the Western World on the unnatural financial order in the world that does not even benefit to population of the rich countries, they yet fail in having any concrete impact on decision-makers. The problem maybe of these movements in Europe was that although the demands were clear and fair, the protests did not challenge the establishment. In other words: because we all understood the unrest will never reach point of a real physical revolution even  if the demands are not fulfilled. In the worst case the young people will abstain at the next elections and that, the decision makers know it. Politicians are keen to do a lot of things to ensure people voting for them, dismantling a dysfunctioning system that feeds them is not one of them.

Same goes for the Occupy Wall Street movement: it can make a difference only if the 1% understand that the 99% will put their fight above everything else and anything else, including themselves. The crucial point for the Arab Spring is that governments are falling or shaking because they understood that people are ready to die for their ideas and that everytime somebody dies, the crowd does not diminish in size but augments. Because they know that from Friday to Friday, the rage of the protesters becomes more and more physically impossible  to contain for police/armed forces.

It is not about being violent during the protests, it is about making clear that even if a crowd is met by violence – and we are not talking about pepper spray, we are talking about another level of violence that can cost lives – the crowd will still continue and in the contrary they will glorify the sacrifice of every single life. The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions succeeded because even if the protesters where peaceful and unarmed, the repressive forces were forced to give up, because they were totally out of control of the situation. Because they knew that they will be unable to stop the crowd marching towards the ministries or presidential palaces at the risk of their lives.

Now, the Occupy Wall Street movement, if it really wants to change the world and impact on the financial world, should understand that nothing concrete will happen until the 1% really feel threatened from inside their ivory tower by the 99% that are ready to bring down the tower, and sit on everything that is in it. It is not about sending death threats to these people, it is about making their outrageous lifestyle and actions impossible to continue. In that country where a very few people managed to send thousands of young Americans to go get killed in Irak just for oil, it is already a fact the of Occupy Wall Street movement is opposing nothing else but people that really consider owning the lives of Americans and that will not hesitate to sacrifice all what it needs to maintain the system as it is.

To occupy wall street protesters, I know I am nobody to give my ‘advice’: if you really mean to change things, push for occupying Wall Street for real, and make understand that you are ready to physically sacrifice for it (not that events have to turn violent, but note that in front of you, you have a lot of people ready to do anything legal and illegal to satisfy their greed). Make understand that your intention is not only shouting against capitalism outside buildings in a park nearby, but that you will interrupt the financial activities inside. Only when the 1% inside the buildings of Wall Street will understand that the 99% outside have no upper limit in their determination to perturb the financial markets, they will consider reforms of the financial system. Occupy Wall Street can be a real difference, give yourself the means for it to happen.

Female Athlets: don’t forget you HAVE to be sexy

I was watching on TV the french sports news. The main headline was of course the French rugby national team winning against Canada during the world cup. After this came several other sport news – basketball, football, etc. Like most of the time, the news were all related to masculine athletes – feminine sports suffer from an under-representation in medias. But then came some news related to feminine athletes – the feminin basketball team of Lyon. Not really that they were interested in the sportive performances of the team though… they commented the new outfit of the team. Indeed, the athletes will now play wearing a short dress instead of a t-shirt and pants.

 

New suit, old story: athlet or not, it looks like apparently for a woman to appear in the headlines and in the news, she has to “deserve it” through her appearance, not her performance. Lot of work still to do here for feminism.

It is often said that the sports scene is sexist; it is certainly true. For example, female athlets suffered for a long time from the unattractivity of their careers for sponsors due to the lack of interest of public and media in their sports. The last decade saw the emergence of a few mediatic female athlets that helped to drag the attention on their sports and attracted to them the sponsors, who shaped for them an oversexualized public image. In comparision, their image is strikingly different from the image of male athlets. Looking at advertising campaigns, female athlets are generally posing in soft porn ads, whereas male athlets are generally posing practicing their sport or in a suit, representing an image of prestige, performance and strenghth (cf. pictures below).

And I am still wondering: aren’t female athlets – even the most talented and gifted amongst them – exploited as sexual objects only because after all it’s what the audiance wants to see? So why are we, as an audiance, brought to be disinterested in anything else a woman has to offer except her sexualized image?

 

 

 

London Riots: and what if you tried to understand before you condemn?

Il y aura chaque hiver le “scandale des sans-logis” et chaque été la “violence des banlieues”. Abbé Pierre

Individual choice is like the random trajectory of the atoms of a gas or a liquid: on the microscopic scale, an atom changes abruptly its path from right to left, from up to down every milliseconds, but on the macroscopic scale, the liquid or the gas, as a collection of trillions of trillions of atoms, does not benefit from the same freedom of choice, it always ends up following the trajectory you can calculate with laws of physics. A collection of “almost free” individuals form a bound global state.

The microscopic randomness and the macroscopic fatality are a good illustration of the London riots nights. Needless to adopt an apologist attitude. When violence erupts, you can never dismiss individual responsability: because very rare are the situations where striclty saying you cannot make anything else than responding violently. But when violence becomes a mass phenomenon, it goes beyond individual  choices: before you condemn, you have to understand the long process and the numerous  parameters that shape the final collective state. Two, three or ten looters, it is criminality. England in fire three nights in a row, it is a social phenomenon.

Mark Duggan’s murder by police forces was a firestarter event, because it symbolically put in picture what a young generation is experiencing: being offered no alternative to the perpetual “no future” state of being, being forgot God knows why and by God knows who, is to give “death” and violence as an unescapable issue. If the unique interaction these young people have with the State is the perpetual chase game with the police, there is very few chance they consider the land they are living in as a shared good to preserve and to take care of and there is a high probability they have only revenge and hate and destruction to give in return of the disregard they receive.

We all remember the French suburbs uprising of 2005, that also began with the tragic death of two young people electrocuted by a generator during a police chase. When cars where put on fire, comments went on and on about the fail of the ‘integration policy’ and the french multicultural model, the massive immigration, the disastrous unemployement rate in french suburbs, the poverty, the despair of a better future. Everybody called for a readjutment of politics with the civil society in the suburbs and reconsidering of the urban policy. But in the following years, all France managed to do, is to talk about the youth of suburbs, but not with it.

Six years later, the issues of unemployement, poverty, underground economy and social exclusion are unsolved, whereas they are instrumentalized in political debates (french indentity debate, populist parties high scores at elections, islamophobic and xenophobic arguments, etc). Diminished as citizens, asked to prove their “frenchness”, young people of French suburbs are increasingly “out of France”. The most worrying came when the mayor of the small town of Sevran called for the army to come and deal with the gangs. At this point, France officially designated its youth in the suburbs as the ennemies of the Republic. Hopefully, UK will be able to give a better answer to their own youth.

Why Tunisians don’t want to vote?

Tunisians united to oust a dictator: because a whole people wanted their freedom; they wanted to have their right to speak and chose their rulers, the right to live decently and the right to not live with constant fear. So was the Jasmine Revolution of January 14. It is then with much enthusiasm that hundreds of political parties, syndicates and associations were created. It is for building the new country, with a constitution shaped just like its population, that were announced the elections for the constitutive assembly. Many times postponed, due to the difficulties encountered by the transitionnal government to solve the slightest issue regarding to the reforms to lead, and due to the new political game involving the members of the former system, the historical opponents of the regime and the protestors and newcomer in politics afraid to see the revolution fail to fulfil its goal. Finally, the elections are to be hold on October 23rd.

The ISIE (Instance Supérieure Indépendante pour les Elections), managed by Kamel Jendoubi, is monitoring the elections to ensure a fair and transparent process, for the first ever free elections taking place in the History of Tunisia. The ISIE launched a few weeks ago a massive campaign to encourage Tunisians to get registred for the elections. Indeed, until now in Tunisia, the citizens were automatically receiving their voter’s card. The new system asks for potential electors to register in town halls and embassies in a period of time going from July 11th to August 2nd.

The ISIE were providing continuously estimates of the number of registration. Since the very first days, Tunisians did not seem to rush to get registres; the number were low. Less than 2% of Tunisian potential electors registred after the first week, about 25% at the end of the registration period. The ISIE decided to extend for two more weeks the registration period. Disappointing: Tunisians do not seem at all interested in voting.

How come a people that mobilized to topple a regime is indifferent to voting, one of the basic rights they asked for and fought for? Many explanations were given:

• the lack of a “democratic culture”: full generations of Tunisians were never part of their own political system; they never were but spectators to this comedy the old regime was calling “democracy”, knowing what horrible truth lies behind the words. The idea of voting with effective result might be too new to most of the people to take the initiative to register and to chose a candidate. They might actually have made a choice but not dare to make it, fearing the reaction of the rulers, or maybe they do not get that their voice really make a difference.
• the confusion with the old system: the old system did not require registering, thus a large part of Tunisians are not aware that registration is a necessery step.
• the contradictory ISIE guidelines: dates change following you consult one source or the other, required documents to bring change, unclear specifications, etc. Tunisians, whose a great part never voted in their entire life, whose a substantial part is illetrate or two poor to be wired 24/7 for new updates may feel totally lost.
• the contestation: the political game opposing the parties (PDP, enNahdha, etc), where every political leader tries to make coalitions to bring down others, where attacks and rumors hit every side, gives maybe the feeling to the Tunisian population that politicians do not have the interest of the people set as a priority, therefore incitating them to “boycott” the elections. The brutality with which the police breaks sit-ins and protests and the extent of the emergency state might well also contribute in unsecuring the citizen: why would they vote for building a new authoritarian state? Indeed, many of Tunisians often say that since the revolution “nothing has changed“.

Like in most complex situations, the answer is certainly made of all these different explanations. But there is still a last one has – sadly – to consider: maybe, Tunisians do not register, simply because they do not care about voting. The idea in itself seems a bit odd: why did they do a revolution in the first place if they did not care? Well, first, it does not take more than some part (say, 10 or 20%) of a population to carry on a  revolution.This does not mean that the rest of the population do not agree with the idea of a revolution, but that they are not active in the process: they follow it, but from far. Then, given the fact that an authoritarian state cannot survive for 23years without not only by scaring the population, but also by growing in them the uninterest for political matters, a good proportion of the Tunisian population was always very indifferent to politics.

The propaganda is more than convincing about some one-sided truth, it is also about telling “take care of your own business, and we take care of our own“. In such a case, the whole background of the mediatic culture, of the society, of the teaching in schools can evolve into directing people to get interested and focused on secondary matters: consumerism, for example. People died to bring us the right to vote, but what can you do, voting is definetly not as funny as going to shopping, gossiping or watching sports on TV. From my personnal experience, sadly, I have to say that many of our compatriots fall in that category of citizens that have closed their sight to the very idea of participative citizenship. I think that getting rid of this mentality is the biggest challenge of the Revolution: and it will certainly not be achieved by the upcoming elections. If half of the generation of our children are educated to participative citizenship, it will already be an outstanding victory for Tunisia.

The DSK-like machism trilogy: the Hooker, the Witch and the Good Wife

Two months now that the sex assault case involving the ex-Chief of the IMF Dominique Strauss-Khan is ongoing, augmented since last week with a new affair where a young french journalist, Tristane Banon, accuses him as well of trying to rape her. It took Nafissatou Diallo to put charges on DSK for Tristane Banon, who claims since 2003 to be a victim of DSK, to get over her fear to not be believed.

Besides these criminal charges, the french public scene is full of stories involving DSK and women: he is depicted by most of the people that were in contact with him as a “predator” with exuberant sexual behaviour, that knows no real limit and does not really understand women’s refusal. Those who were not raped by DSK anyway talk about his manner of heavily insisting, to the point that some of them say explicitely they were so afraid to be left alone in a room with him they made everything to avoid him. An internal note in the IMF kindly advises female staff to avoid as much as possible to stay alone with him in an office.

If only trials can tell us truth about these affairs, it is already possible to draw a first quick conclusion: in the worst case, DSK relation to women is criminal, in the best case it is “just” pathologic. In both cases, DSK relation to women perfectly symbolizes the darkest side of machism: reducing women to primitive archetypes, and objectifying them in the men-women relations. For DSK and the likes, women can only be of three types:

1. The Hooker: Nafissatou Diallo… and any woman, by default
   For DSK, the world is like a giant brothel: he just has to “pick up” the hooker he wants and “pay” for that… Women are believed disposable by default, and the interaction with them is essentially sexual. No real moral consideration limits him in his “choice”: they can be his friends’ wives, his assistants, the staff of palaces he visits, relatives of his ex-wife, etc. The personnality of the woman never really enters into account: although he had hundreds of sex affairs with women around him, he does not seem to have any long term extra-conjugal affair, involving if not feelings, something that would look like a person-to-person intimacy: women are consumers’ good, uninteresting once the sexual encounter took place. As a “client”, he uses his personnal, intellectual, political and economical power to convince them to accept his sexual proposals. As a proeminent personnality, he knows how to use the psychological impact he makes on women inferior to him on the “social ladder”. As sexual employees, they “cannot” really refuse to provide him the service he is requesting. Getting them to have sex with him only needs him to find the good “payement” mode, and sometimes the suitable pressure mode.Nafissatou Diallo, the cleaning lady of the Sofitel, is just one of the many he wanted when he saw her. Without any “seduction ritual”, it went directly into a sexual interaction, whether it was forced or not. She was there, she was to be available. And after all, in order to prove his unguiltiness, isn’t his strategy simply to try to convince the jury that “anyway, this woman is a hooker”? (Letting aside the fact that even professional prostitutes can be raped…).
2. The Witch: Tristane Banon
   Given the high social position of DSK, his wealth, his intellectual capacities, and even his physical force, very few seem to “resist” to him. The sexual encounter generally quickly takes place, and once it is finished, he can go back to his business. Thus, very few women have the strenghth to say no to DSK, and if they do so, even fewer are strong enough to repeat “No” again and again as he repeatedly insists. Tristane Banon is one of these few. Maybe is it because she is journalist and writer and thus she is literate enough to not be vulnerable the intellectual domination he can use on less educated women; maybe is it because her mother is herself a politician (in the same party than DSK) that made her harder to scare with the fact he’s a politician; maybe it is because her godmother is DSK ex-wife, enabling her to see in him a simple man to whom she can say “no” rather than the powerful figure. Anyway, the refusal of a woman seems to be difficult to understand for him. Since the moment Tristane Banon put charges on him, his entourage deploy their strange strategy to discredit her: they spread the word that she is mad, unstable, she is a liar, she invents things. In one word: a woman who says no to DSK is simply a woman out of her mind. As a free minded woman, Tristane Banon bothers DSK because she was not impressible enough, not only for her to sleep with him, but also for her to keep silent about it. She refuses to be one of these nice ‘hookers’, who do what they have to do and let him go back to his business. For DSK, Tristane Banon and women like her strong enough to firmly say no to him are “witches”, the women who do not submit to the natural  order of Nature, where women give and men take. Defying this “natural establishment” is viewed as an heretic act, a crime of subversivity. The same way that during the Middle-Age the inquisitors that were convicting women of being witches were accusing them of proceeding to satanic celebrations where ‘immoral’ sex acts were performed, DSK entourage try to spread the word about a nymphomaniac, sexually disturbed Tristane Banon. (Letting aside the fact that even a mentally unstable woman can be raped)
3. The Good Wife: Anne Sinclair
   As much as a man can objectify women and disinterest from them once he had sex with, the presence of a ‘good wife’ is of primordial importance to a man like DSK: it represents the only little point of mental and emotionnal stability in his relations with women. But here again we are in a symbolically commercial transaction: the relation does not build on trust and respect, since the cheating is implicitely “part of the game”, but on mutual benefit. For DSK, Anne Sinclair is rich, she’s part of his political career, she’s an ally, she is for him a family, meaning a stable and reliable entity of his fluctuent life. On the other side, Anne Sinclair benefits from this situation in sense that she lives her political ambitions through him, as well as by taking the continuous role of the cheated wife, she is the “good one”; she “invests” in DSK to achieve what she knows she can’t make directly herself due to the sexism of the society (the same way Hillary Clinton “invested” in Bill Clinton). She knows about his relations with other women, but not only she makes as if she didn’t know to not lose all she built with him and the social prestige that goes with it, but also she takes secretely pleasure in being “The One”, the woman that remains here, while all others, regardless of how young, beautiful, smart they can be, are only temporary. A woman who dominates all other women through her husband.

The DSK-like machism trilogy (the Hooker, the Witch and the Good Wife), embodied as well by him as by all his entourage that participate to sustain this system (in particular his wife Anne Sinclair), it’s maybe the biggest harm DSK made to women in general: offering one of the sickest models of men-women relations of a socially successful men. If the media coverage of the Sofitel case would allow at least to deconstruct this sexist model in men’s and women’s minds, it would be indeniably a huge step forward in the feminine cause.

Rage Against the Junkies

Two events this week were featuring famous “junkies”: the first one was the disastrous concert of Amy Winehouse where she appeared too drugged/drunk to perform and the second one was the trial of John Galliano in Paris, facing racism charges after a video showing him drugged/drunk making the apology of Hitler.

In a way, both cases are he same: some very talented artist, praised for their outstanding performances/creations for years, openly and publicly addicted to drugs until their addiction leads to their dramatic lowering; and thus inspiring the general audiance rejection and anger. As long as Amy Winehouse or John Galliano were lucid enough to be able to offer quality services, there was indulgence regarding to their addiction (indulgence and even sometimes something of a fascination! Isn’t Winehouse’s biggest tune a song saying “They tried to make me go to rehab, I said No, No, No“?), but once they became too weak to produce what was exactly expected from them, once they became targets easy to reach, why bother to treat them with the minimum respect due to any human being? Is that the new mainstrean philosophy: treat artists like gods when they are OK, throw them away like old dirty tissues when too wasted to entertain?

Would have Amy Winehouse or John Galliano not been drunk/drugged, their behaviour would be totally unacceptable. But as junkies, they should be treated as they are: people in suffering, in need of assistance and not fully accountable or responsible of what they do/say when they are put in a situation they did not really chose. Indeed, John Galliano has not uploaded the video himself and Amy Winehouse did certainly not arrange herself her tour. In both cases, we have here people suffering from a disease (drug addiction IS a disease), tricked into a public appearance that do not represent them as human beings and as artists.

As junkies, it is of course absolutely necessary that measures are taken to withdraw them from the public scene: they need help and rest to quit drugs, the quality of their work suffers from their addiction and their employers are playing their reputation as well. But the same way no one would consider hooting an athlet for not running well when injured or put charges on somebody talking during their sleep, shouldn’t the public have a much more consideration to these two people who are, after all, the victims of the situation? Why not keep the rage against those who exploit a junkie singer to make money on her past fame or exploit the image of a junkie fashion designer? Maybe because those who are responsible of these two disasters are certainly convenable businessmen, wearing nice suits and having a nice office and all, and above all because they are able to answer the insults, unlike those who are too wasted to react? Actually, I always found very strange how our societies are able to make gods/icons/myths of normal human beings, just because they are beautiful, rich or famous. All we see here with Winehouse and Galliano is the exact counterpart.

The way Amy Winehouse and John Galliano reached the very bottom after reaching the very top, actually, is a reminder: we live in a world were might is right.

The constructive feminism of Manal Al Sharif and the destructive feminism of Femen topless activists

The story of Manal Al Sharif, a 32 years old Saudi woman  jailed 10 days for defying the driving ban in her country, is a perfect illustration of the extreme repression endured by Saudi women. Her act – being filmed while driving and uploading the video to promote the Women2Drive campaign – was courageous and thus inspired other women in the Kingdom to follow her example. She expressed in the video the wish that she would be only the beginning of the revolt of women like “the first drop is the beginning of the rain”.

She enhanced a movement that had repercussion far beyond Saudi Arabia: many feminist associations, many NGOs, many papers talked about the event and certainly contributed in the global awareness on the terrific situation of women rights in the Gulf. Meanwhile, Femen, a feminist association in Ukraine organized a solidarity protest protest in Kiev around the Saudi Embassy where several of the protestors showed up topless.

So what is the outcome of the Manal Al-Sharif case?

1. Manal Al Sharif encouraged women (and men!) in her country to stand for their rights. Several dozen of people follow now her example to break the unfair rules. She showed that Saudi  women are courageous enough to take themselves the initiative. What is interesting is that she cares more aboout driving than about, for example, wearing or not the veil: she wants to achieve men/women equality through equal rights to act (drive, express, vote, work, etc), not just through her appearance. Thus her contribution to women cause is positive.
2. Femen activists  exhibited their own bodies and contributed in nothing neither for Manal Al Sharif, neither for Saudi women, neither for Ukranian women. They finished doing exactly what sexists do: use women’s body as an object. What message did Femen send to the world? “We, women, we can’t do anything, we can’t draw attention unless we exhibit our breasts”. Thus, their contribution to women cause is negative.

The feminism of Manal Al Sharif is constructive because it breaks the prejudice about “women consisting only in an empty body”, while the feminism of topless Femen activists is destructive because it does nothing else than enforcing this prejudice. Manal Al-Sharif uses provocation as a tool to change the law, Femen use provocation for the sole purpose of having the feeling to exist. The sad thing is that certainly Femen wants to act to improve women’s rights: but just type “Femen” in a search engine, all you will find is hundreds of entries about the “topless protests”.

At the end of the day, Femen may be very active, the world associates Femen to nothing else than to naked women, while Manal Al Sharif  became a model for women not because of how she looks, but because of how she acts. And that makes a huge difference.

The Syrian Gay Girl hoax: reaching the limits of the social medias in matter of information

A couple of weeks ago, at the beginning of the Syrian uprising, a blog post went viral. It was called My father, the hero and it was the testimony of a girl living in Damascus on how she was saved by the powerful monologue of her father from being arrested by two men of the regime. The girl, Amina Arraf, also happened to be gay, and her whole blog, A Gay Girl in Damascus, was a lively and passionating diary of an atypical person in the Middle-East. The father was so eloquent, the words sounded so true, so universal that the link was widely spread in the social medias and the story even ended in professionnal news websites and papers.

A few weeks later, the cousin of Amina Arraf posted a blog post where she was announcing the blogger was kidnapped and held in a secret place. The ‘Syrian Gay Girl’ story had so much moved arund the world that when this news came out, human rights activists began to advocate her cause, to ask for her release. It is at this point where a message was published on the blog, where a certain Tom McMaster was presenting his apologies: Amina was a fictional character, invented by this American man quite familiar with the Middle East culture, a wannabe writer. Things went out of control when Amina’s story became viral, and he tried to make her ‘disappear’ by publishing the news of her abduction. But when he saw that people were trying to get her released, giving time and energy they could use to release other real people in need of assistance, he understood he went too far: he couldn’t do anything else than revealing all this was only a hoax.

This story is interesting: it is actually like a real time and large scale experience on the biggest weakness of the social medias, the vulnerability to misinformation. The story was read thousands of times and reached all parts of the world. Today, even if the writer himself revealed the truth about it, there still must be hundreds of people still believing that there exists somebody called Amina Arraf, a anti-Assad gay girl in Damascus.

Tweets and wall posts are only transient in the sense that they are within seconds replaced by other tweets and other wall posts, but they might imprint a mind for a long time. Specialists in communication know well that the first contact with a topic has a stronger impact on the brain than the following. In a passionating article a few years ago in the New Yorker, I remember a neurologist explaining why, for example, the rumor on Obama being a Muslim is essentially more influential on the mind than any of the hundreds of denials of the fact and affirmations on Obama being Christian (the recent controversy on his birth certificate shows the confusion of some part of the American people about ‘who is’ Barack Obama). Basically, it is easier to make a rumor than to dismiss it, even with the strongest and most rational proofs.

To some extent, the Gay Girl in Damascus case reminded me a juridic case in France a couple f years ago: on a trial know as the ‘Trial of Outreau‘, the prosecutor took blindly as granted all what was said by two children accusing more than 20 persons to have performed on them pedophile acts, when flagrant contradictions and absurd descriptions should have warned him on some trickery, all because this was happening in a time where there was some sort of paradigm that children cannot invent such things and lie. Later, when there was deeper expertises that led to the conclusions that all what was said by the children were in fact all lies they were told to tell by their mentally disturbed mother, we realized that we went in very few years from an epoch were children were never listened to by judges to another one where any single word they pronounce is considered as being the exact truth. The trial of Outreau was a ‘wake up call’ to more critic distance with children testimonies: they are an essential evidence but they have to be examinated and analyzed, not straightforwardly validated without any verification.

Similarely, a few years back citing a reference/source/evidence from a website was something ‘not serious’; when writing an essay, students had to give ‘real’ references in hardcopy books and online content was considered to be reliable only when it was confirmed by some offline content. But somewhere between the Iranian martyr Neda and the web 2.0 revolution, internet became the ‘mother of all informations’. Today, if something isn’t referenced by Google, it is assumed that it simply  doesn’t exist and Wikipedia became the number one source of information in the world. Blogging was, a few years ago, seen as a narcissistic activity of those who want to live some substitute of fame, today bloggers are the new opinion makers. Posting on YouTube is something ‘raw’, it can only be true: people are less keen to believe a TV news professionnal  footage than a video taken by the mobile phone of an amateur.  Somehow, like the Trial of Outreau demonstrated how we swung very quickly from an extreme denial of children’s testimony to a blind belief in their words, the Gay Girl in Damascus Hoax showed us how we went from a disdain to any form of online content to a too big confidence in bloggers words. Not that we should dismiss bloggers when it comes to information, but we should maybe try to not forget that words are not evidence. Tom McMaster blogging as Amina Arraf depicted in an extremely absurd scenery how much we wanted to believe in her story, to the point to not ask anything close to an evidence of her existence. Even journalists, NGOs and companies could not resist to the trend: the more a story is retweeted, the more it is credible.

When an information jumps from one person to the other in less than 140 characters, the speed of propagation makes it possible to reach thousands of people before anybody even has physical time to verify the information. Most of the people retransmittnig it are ‘consumers’ of information, not professionals. They not only don’t have the means to lead an investigation, they also don’t have the ‘time’ or ‘interest’.

We, social media users, certainly also propagate around us the information that not only seems valid or relevant, but also what we feel emotionnally connected to. In the context of an ‘Arab Spring’ initiated by the tragic suicide of the Tunisian fruit seller Mohammed Bouazizi, the ‘ordinary heroes’ like Wael Ghonim or Mohammed Nabbous are the living symbols of the causes we believe in, and in consequence we identify to them. In claims like ‘We are all Khaled Said‘, we all become victims of the abuse that was inflicted to the body of Khaled Said; it is like a projection. It is certainly why we all projected ourselves in the body of Amina Arraf when her father was challenging the two policemen; we didn’t need at that time any other proof of the story being true or not: do you need a proof to convince yourself when you experienced it yourself?

The sad counterpart of the propagation of a lie only because we are emotionnally connected to it is that the propagation through the social medias of the news that do not relate emotionnally to us are harder to propagate, regardless of it being verified or not, relevant or not. In perticular, news not involving ‘good characters’ like in any good story are more difficult to transmit: why the story of Manal Al-Sharif, the Saudi woman put in jail for defying the drive ban, moved all around the globe when the thousands of anonymous slave maids in Saudi Arabia never got 1% of such an interest? Because the maids didn’t put upload on YouTube a video of their work conditions? Why the fictional Amina Arraf got more audiance than other flesh and blood anti-Assad opponent caught and tortured and in dire need of a general mobilization around them? Why in Europe the citizen all know it all about DSK sex assault case while very few are aware that 2-3months ago an European country, Hungary, adopted the first autoritarian constitution in the history of the European Union?

For the Iranian Green Movement and the Arab uprisings, the social medias play an important role, in countries where individual rights are so restricted that the access to a reliable information is impossible through the official medias; the citizen doesn’t have the choice than to become himself the journalist that do not exist on the field. They upload on Youtube what they know their official TV channels will never broadcast and they post on their Facebook wall what they know they will not read in their newspapers. But it is a necessity arising from some special context: outside these ‘crisis management’ phases, most of the users would rely much more on professionnal information medias such as Al Jazeera or Euronews than on anything else. There still is a small but active fraction of the users that believe only in ‘bottom-up’ information. If this ‘civil journalism’ phenomenon is to consider as a key feature of the 21st century era of open information, the general public has to keep a bigger critical distance with the information extracted from the social networks. They give sometimes access to first hand and exclusive information, but they stay non-moderated medias and aren’t press agencies.

A worrying trend is the one that sees professionnal journalists take for granted almost blindly bloggers or viral tweets and cite them as sources. The barrier between bloggers and journalists is sometimes so dim that they more and more want to substitute to each other: almost all journalists have their blogs and twitter accounts, but also bloggers are published in professionnal information websites. The perfect illustration of this growing confusion is the Huffington Post, the daily newspaper writter by benevole bloggers. Without objecting bloggers might have very interesting and fresh views on many topics (after all, I am a blogger myself, if I blog it is because I certainly think what happens in my mind is worth being read), being a journalist is also having followed a training and having acquired technical skills to retrieve information, digest it and transmit it to the biggest number. But now we entered in a critical era where numerical information substitutes to physical information: we don’t need anymore to see the Damascus Gay Girl in person and interview her and get the testimony of eye witnesses, we just need to find the link to her blog. If opinions expressed on twitter, facebook or tumblr are certainly informative for journalists to ‘feel’ where the people stand on the acceptation or rejection of what is presented to them, a blog post or a tweet should never become a source of information in itself.

The problem finally is not the fact that the social medias and participative medias are part of the supply chain of the information; the problem consists only in giving them the right place and importance, and understanding what can we reasonnably expect from them. Our social media culture is still extremely young; maybe we just went too enthusiastic about the power of the web 2.0 after the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, and we needed to reach the limits of the social medias in matter of information to be reminded that we should always be critical and cautious about what happens behind the screens.

White establishment feel threatened by equality

A recent study led by Harvard and Tuft universities  show that White Americans believe they are more discriminated against than black people. In their paper “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing” , Norton and Sommers write that “Despite the rush in some quarters to anoint contemporary American society as ‘‘postracial’’ in the wake of Barack Obama’s election as president, a flurry of legal and cultural disputes over the past decade has revealed a new race-related controversy gaining traction: an emerging belief in anti-White prejudice.” The methodology or the survey is simple: researchers asked 209 white and 208 black men and women to rate on a scale on 0 to 10 the racist bias from 1950 to today. Thus each group had to rate the racism against their own ethnic group, as well as the racism against the other ethnic group. The results show that white and black people both perceive that the racism against Black Americans decreased since 1950. The curve of the perception of the black group about the anti-black bias is very similar to the percetpion of the white group of that same bias, only with a versical shift.

On the contrary, the difference in the perception of the anti-White bias by Black and White test groups is dramatic: if both groups consider that the anti-white racism has increased since 1950, the Black group consider it is still extremely low inside the American society today, the White group consider on the contrary that the anti-white bias is quite strong nowadays, and even consider it to be stronger  that the anti-black bias since about the 2000′s. The curves of the anti-black and anti-white bias as perceived by the white group are even anti-correlated: for them, every decrease in the anti-black racism equals directly and automatically to an anti-white racism (this mechanism is called a Zero Sum Game). In other words:   not only the White Americans believe that in today’s American society, a white person is a victim of racism more than a black person is (!), they also believe that the improvement  since the 50s in the fight against the discriminations against black people is in itself a discrimination against the American White people. 

All economical and social indicators show clearly that if black people are, its true, less discriminated than they were in the past, they are still far from receiving equal treatment with white people. Access to labour market, housing, education, healthcare, bank loans: very few are the black people who did not experience these forms of daily and ordinary discrimination. So do the White Americans really believe that in today’s America, being white is tougher than being Black? Norton and Summers study does not allow to answer to that question, but the “Zero Sum Game” that is absent from the Black group and present in the White group might well suggest that aquisition of rights is perceived by White people as being a competitive race (due to a confusion between a right and a privilege), while it isn’t for Black people, maybe because fighting discrimination made to ethnic minorities requires the destruction of the paradigms of the White superiority. All at once, White people who were living inside a system where only white values were ruling things find themselves confronted to the existence of other types of values, making theirs non-universal. The White people not having to follow the rules of the others is not even an issue here: nobody ever asked them to; it’s the simple idea that their own rules now apply only to themselves and don’t extend to other that bothers them, basically.

It would be interesting to see if the same “Zero Sum Game” is observed in other societies where the domination of a group on another one existed and was (or still is) progressively abolished. A few cases could be studied, like for example:

1. Men/Women: do men feel that there is a anti-men sexism?
2. Rich/poor: do rich feel poor people have more rights than them?
3. Nationals/foreigners: do nationals feel they are dominated by foreigners?

And the ultimate one combining all others: is the life tougher for a White Rich man than for a Black poor foreign woman? Who knows…

5 scientific facts misused to validate demagogic ideologies

As a scientist, I was always interested in how the scientific discoveries changed the world and improved the understanding we have of things. I think my favorite story has always been the Foucault Pendulum (the experiment was set up by Léon Foucault in spite of the mockery of all his fellows physicists, and it allowed to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth simply by observing the precession of a pendulum), for it summerizes in itself all what is moving and beautiful in science: knowledge is as simple and difficult as abolishing the inner barriers of preconception and the outer barriers of perception.

However, we know scientific facts are not a straightforward path to reality: if it was so there would simply be a consensus about how the world is and no reason to diverge. Actually, a fact is rather a grasp of reality that one needs to merge with other facts inside a conceptual frame where they are linked by causality, forming a scientific theory. And because this conceptual frame depends at the same time on pre-established uncomplete knowledge and individual limitations on abstraction/orientation/etc, a same set of facts (or data) can result in very different scientific theories. The only conviction scientists can have in matter of science is that they will never understand the world, they will only, in the best case, understand the oversimplified sketch of the world they drew themselves: a modern version of Socrates “All I know is that I know nothing.”.

This equivoque between facts and theories is not a purely intellectual issue: carefully selected disparate facts can be shaped into totally odd theories in order to validate some ideologies. For example, some 19th century british and french scientists contributed to give some credibility to racial (and racist) theories by considering mensurations of african skulls, supposedly assessing white man superiority over black man because of a bigger brain size; of course it was easier to conclude to that bigger brain size for white people when only grown up skulls were measured for white people, while for black people, children skulls were not excluded from the data series.

Nowadays, this misuse of scientific facts for building theories advocacing for demagogic ideologies is still very common, although the manipulation is much more subtle. In fact it even became a must have for any ideology: in a world were many believe in numbers as if they were antic runes and in scientists as if they were prophets, the scientific fact is like a stamp of integrity to not be questioned further. This enlights the main problem of the educational systems have with science teaching:  there is a massive denial of the vital need to teach espistemology together with science.

I tried to list 5 of misused scientific facts to show how, although we live in an open information era, it is still very easy to mislead people into unaccurate conclusions with true but ill-selected facts:

1. “We use only 10% of our brain”… and I am sure 10’000$ represent an investment a wiser you would approve! (misused by: scientologists, life coaches, etc)
   We have to clarify here the full fact and what it really states: it is true that we say only a small fraction of our brain… at some given time. When you are going through your tasks, your brain is never fully involved, as there is specific areas defined for specific functions. Unless you are trying to do everything at the same time (eg.: eating, while running, while sleeping and dreaming, while reading, while having sex, while talking on the phone, etc), which is physically impossible (the same way running a car on 1,2,3,4,5 and R gears at the same time is not possible), there is no reason to use more that some percentage (say, 10%) of all your neurones at the same time. But that does not mean 90% of your brain is unused, it only means these 90% are used in other tasks at some other time of your activities. If only 10% of the brain was “working”, then one could get a surgery cutting 90% of the brain without any harm, which is of course absurd, we know that very tiny lesions can damage a brain. This “10%” fact works well with people because not only it has something flattering their ego, but also it keeps them confident that, being very inside as smart as Albert Einstein was, their is hope that they are only an “investment” away from  becoming a genius, making of them particularely naive towards snake oils and sectarians.
2. “Men’s and women’s brains are different”… and this is why women should be grateful to stay at home cleaning and cooking, while men can’t help cheating! (misused by: sexists, macho, anti-feminists)
   Yes, there are little differences between men’s and women’s brains (little differences in size, neurotransmettors, etc), but running social conclusions is not only wrong, it can also be dangerous. Men being hunters long ago is not an satisfactory explanation to unfaithfullness, the same way women high expertise in maintaining the cave tidy is not an suitable objection to those who prefer sport, TV or work over ironing. Life experience, social influence and education accounts much more in explaining difference in behaviours than the men-women brain comparision. There is no problem in having a world of differences between men and women (it is not less gratifying to be a ‘traditional’ woman than an ‘independant’ one), it is just out of focus to endorse out of it fatalism on feminin  condition.   
   
3. “Space and Time are relative”… and so anything else is! (misused by: anybody who would like to avoid the embarassement of explaining their un-consistant opinion)
   First, yes, according to Einstein’s Relativity, space and time are relative, but unless you are an electron travelling in CERN accelerator at 99% of speed of light, there is little chance you ever experience personnaly time dilation ans length contraction. Space-Time relativity is of crucial importance to understand natural phenomenons like electrodynamics, gravitation and Universe expansion, but it does not account for sociological conclusions about relativism, historical conclusions about cultural subjectivity and so on. A very famous “experiment” called “Fashionable Nonsense” by Alain Sokal and Jean Bricmont treats specifically on the pointless transposition of physical theories like Relativity and Quantum Mechanics to  sociology and other human sciences.
4. “Pink Flamingos are gay”… and don’t deny it you homophobic freak! (misused by: gay and lesbian groups)
   That is actually a pretty interesting one because it is one of the few sustained by some scientists themselves certainly to support a cause they believe good or because the topic is still so new we still haven’t gathered enough knowledge. There is indeed a list of animal species with documented homosexual behaviours, among which the flamingos are one of the most popular (see the story of Carlos and Fernando) but first it is just pushing away the question it wants to answer to (to observe an homosexual behavior for a sheep does not say if the animal is genetically “born with it” or if it is some external circumstance that enhanced the behavior), second because animal sexuality studies conclusions cannot be transposed to human beings (alligators sometimes eat their own eggs and babies, many mammals eat the placenta after giving birth… but it would be false to think humans do because those animals do so!), third because if it was conclusive about human sexuality, we would observe as much gay animals than lesbian animals… while we observe almost exclusively gay animals. A struggle for recognition and rights asked by a group of people should never use biased and unsuitable scientific data: not only moral causes have to be moral in themselves without calling for external validation of science, but also try to imagine what happens if the scientific research finally conclude this is false?
   
5. “25% of Nobel Prize winners are Jew while they represent only 0.25% of world population”… and understand that Chosen People don’t have time to waste arguing with you! (misused by: zionists, arabism/panarabism nostalgic, etc)
   (Not a scientific fact strictly saying, but statistics are very often used and presented as being scientific facts) First time I read the argument it was in an arabic forum or a group mail or something like this, where the sender (an arabic person) was trying to “prove” that the backwardness of the Arab/Muslim countries was due to the very little interest in these countries for the noble quest of knowledge, and that given the comparision with jewish Nobel Prize laureates, we might well “deserve the way the world treats us”. Later, I became aware that this was actually a very classical argument used and misused by many. When studied carefully, there is only two revelant facts that can be extracted from the winners’ list: so-to-say 100% of science Nobel Prize winners are from and work in rich industrial countries where money is available for scientific research, and the only Nobel Prize categories really accessible for non-rich countries are Peace and Literature, for war and poverty make good reasons to seek peace and write good novels. So the statistics about the Nobel Prize winners is not a proof of some jewish, western, african, asian, men, women significant natural or cultural predominace or any other kind of superiority. Almost any statistic quantifying some complex trend in an ethnic group or population comes with its set of simplifications, underestimation of sensitive parameters, biased conclusions. Whatever you want to say, there always is a statistic you can find to emphasize; this is certainly the deep reason of the success of statistics in politics.  This does not mean that statistics should not be trusted, it means only statistics should never be partial, and always carefully analysed.
   

The success of science is everywhere around us: technology, medecine, knowledge. Scientists generally fight hard against the misconceptions about their field of speciality, but if there is some generalization one can make about scientists, they are often quite weak in communicating efficiently: they generally try to talk reasonalby to the mind, while politicians/advertisers/etc can grant communication success because they rather talk with emotional references, desires, attractivity… and a few “fashionable” scientific facts. And if we, scientists, could learn this from them?