[LINK] "The Tyranny of the Local"
Jun. 1st, 2010 08:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThe Global Sociology Blog enunciates some of the main reasons why I dislike anti-globalization movements ("globalization" being defined by me as any effort to create a relatively centralized or ideologically homogeneous global community): some local communities just can't be trusted with power. Some of them need to be disciplined. SocProf starts with two specific examples.
National governance is sometimes necessary to fight tyrannies; regional organizations can help surveil their member nation-states; global organizations can do most anything if they can get mobilized. There might be democracy deficits in different areas, but they can be remedied, or compensated for. In the two examples cited above, the press has revealed the atrocities that some local communities would like to commit, raising the possibility of remedying it (as was the case for those Afghan girls, fortunately). Destroying globalization altogether would be a catastrophe for humanity: I don't trust the local. And neither should you.
“The chief rabbi of a West Bank settlement has prohibited women from standing in a local community election.
Rabbi Elyakim Levanon of the Elon Moreh settlement, near Nablus, said women lacked the authority to stand for the post of local secretary.
He wrote in a community newspaper that women must only be heard through their husbands.
No women have registered for the election due to be held later on Wednesday, Israeli media reported.
The rabbi made his comments in the community’s newspaper after an unidentified young woman wrote to him asking if she could run for the position of community secretary, the Israeli news website Ynet News said.”
[. . .]
“KABUL, Afghanistan — The two Afghan girls had every reason to expect the law would be on their side when a policeman at a checkpoint stopped the bus they were in. Disguised in boys’ clothes, the girls, ages 13 and 14, had been fleeing for two days along rutted roads and over mountain passes to escape their illegal, forced marriages to much older men, and now they had made it to relatively liberal Herat Province.
Sumbol, 17, a Pashtun girl, said she was kidnapped and taken to Jalalabad, then given a choice: marry her tormentor, or become a suicide bomber.
Instead, the police officer spotted them as girls, ignored their pleas and promptly sent them back to their remote village in Ghor Province. There they were publicly and viciously flogged for daring to run away from their husbands.
Their tormentors, who videotaped the abuse, were not the Taliban, but local mullahs and the former warlord, now a pro-government figure who largely rules the district where the girls live.
National governance is sometimes necessary to fight tyrannies; regional organizations can help surveil their member nation-states; global organizations can do most anything if they can get mobilized. There might be democracy deficits in different areas, but they can be remedied, or compensated for. In the two examples cited above, the press has revealed the atrocities that some local communities would like to commit, raising the possibility of remedying it (as was the case for those Afghan girls, fortunately). Destroying globalization altogether would be a catastrophe for humanity: I don't trust the local. And neither should you.
