by Jules Evans | Apr 10, 2007 | Influence and networks
I’m writing a book at the moment about social anxiety. It’s an emotional disorder that makes you terrified of being negatively judged or humiliated by others. It was only officially recognized by the DSM Manual of clinical disorders in 1980, but since then, psychologists have come to think it could affect between 6 and 12% of the population in the US, making it the most common anxiety disorder and the third most common mental illness (after depression and alcoholism) in the West.
My book is looking at the cultural determinants of the illness. One of the questions I ask is, why is it so prevalent in the West, particularly in the US, and why does it hardly appear in east Asian communities, where studies suggest it affects just 0.5% of the population?
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by David Steven | Apr 3, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa
Among the responses to the Iranian hostage crisis, this one: it serves the Brits right. In the LA Times, Niall Ferguson puts it all down to Tony Blair’s weakness over slavery (h/t Kevin Drum):
Let that be a lesson. Even before Britain’s politicians had finished saying sorry last Sunday for depriving millions of their liberty, the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, 15 Britons found themselves deprived of their liberty by the Iranian government. When will Tony Blair ever learn that, in international relations, nice guys finish last?
In the New English Review, another British ex-pat, John Derbyshire thinks the cowardly sailors are to blame.
I certainly think that those British captives who have let themselves be put forward on Iranian TV, that woman wearing a headscarf, and the young man apologizing to the Iranian gangster-rulers, should be court-martialed for dereliction of duty when they get back to Blighty, with shooting definitely an option.
This stuff plays well with the American right – who are busy building British weakness into their ‘how-we-woz-betrayed-in-Iraq’ narrative. Mario Loyola:
The most tragic aspect of this whole drama is the window it has opened into the tortured psyche of our British allies. True enough, Britain is given to bouts of world-weary fatalism—a similar once hit Britain after World War II, and swept Churchill out of office. Still, I could never have guessed the extent to which Britain has accepted the loss of its national power. Our greatest ally, this people who have done so much to spread modernity, to protect and advance human civilization, to better the human condition, seem to have come under the spell of some mixture and pessimism and self-hatred.
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by Alex Evans | Apr 2, 2007 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks
Roula Khalaf has a great piece leading today’s FT about a new rehabilitation program underway in Saudi Arabia for former jihadis. One beneficiary of the program is Abu Suleiman (not his real name), a 33 year old who works in equity research. “But,” says Khalaf, “he has a secret: for the past year the Saudi authorities have been paying his family $800 a month while they work on re-educating him not to be a jihadi”. Khalaf continues:
The de-radicalisation programme uses a mix of heavy religious and psychological education on the “good belief in Islam” to rehabilitate militants. Chosen candidates are plucked from the Saudi prison system, where they enjoy few rights and are sometimes tortured. They are subjected to six to 10 weeks of de-brainwashing in a programme involving 100 official clerics and 30 professionals, including psychologists. Their families are paid a monthly stipend of up to $1,500 to forestall any al-Qaeda networks from paying relatives to keep them on side. Prisoners deemed worthy of graduation are then sometimes assisted in finding jobs and even wives. “They settle down when they marry,” says Abdulrahman al-Hadlaq, chairman of the rehabilitation committee.
What’s interesting about the Saudi approach is that it focuses on social networks rather than on ideology – a point made emphatically by David Kilcullen, an Australian counter-insurgency specialist on secondment to the US State Department, in a New Yorker article by George Packer last December.
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by Alex Evans | Apr 1, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence
Well, that’s what Jenny McCartney argues in the Sunday Telegraph, anyway. McCartney argues that although stabbings of the kind that have dominated headlines in recent weeks remain extremely rare, there’s still no getting around the fact that “our children lead those of all the industrialised nations, by some distance, in teenage pregnancy, early and unprotected sex, smoking and drinking”, with obesity rapidly emerging as an additional concern.
But, she continues, beyond a shared emphasis on the importance of parental responsibility, Labour and Conservative policy on what to do about all this diverges sharply. Where the Conservatives “appear keen to return direct responsibility for bringing up children to parents, the extended family and the wider community of responsible adults, such as teachers”, Labour has developed proposals for a much more statist approach: a new, computerised ‘Children’s Index’.
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