German Chancellor Angela Merkel praises Portugal’s resolve in tackling its debt crisis, but faces angry anti-austerity protesters in Lisbon.
Read the rest here: Merkel lauds crisis-hit Portugal
Category : World News
When the protest began exactly one year ago, the Church of England should also have been angry about the financial crisis
Tragedy, Nietzsche theorised, has two elements, two gods that direct the drama: Dionysus and Apollo. Dionysus is the god of chaos and disorder, sometimes even the god of drunkenness and violence. Apollo is the god of order, calm, clarity and beauty. “These two very different tendencies walk side by side, usually in violent opposition to one another, inciting one another to ever more powerful births.” Thus, says Nietzsche, all great art is generated.
Dionysus and Apollo – or, for my purposes, Occupy and St Paul’s. Their chance meeting a year ago has been characterised by misunderstanding and opposition. Occupy with its earthy populism and Dionysian disdain for formal structures, St Paul’s with its elite Apollonian worship of cold marble and ethereal song – they were destined never to get along. And yesterday’s contretemps in the cathedral was a predictable revisiting of the conflict.
Nietzsche’s idea was that the Dionysians are fundamentally the truth-tellers in the relationship. The world is indeed chaotic and disordered. But this knowledge is so difficult to process, so frightening, we need a structuring lens through which to see it.
Apollo cleans things up, makes wonky lines straight, turns chaos into art, so that we might live with disturbing truth without being overwhelmed by it. Apollonian order is how we emotionally manage Dionysian truth.
Likewise, when it comes to their analysis of the state of the world, it is Occupy who are basically right. Despite the facade of respectability and ordered control presented by our great financial institutions, modern capitalism – turbo-charged by absurd levels of borrowing – is responsible for much of the world’s chaos. In the name of freedom and deregulation, financial anarchy has spread from the housing market to the banks and is now being swallowed up as massive sovereign debt which we will now pass on to our children and grandchildren. The euro will probably collapse and millions more people will suffer enormous hardship. More jobs will be lost and houses repossessed.
The wealthy will be protected by stored-up money. The poor and the not-so-poor will be exposed to the elements. Back in 1992, Francis Fukuyama spoke of the end of history, as if capitalism had settled all the big arguments. How wrong he was. We are now facing a future of social chaos and public disorder.
This is the Dionysian truth named by Occupy. But it is so overwhelming, we don’t begin to know how to fix it. And so it goes in the mental box marked “too difficult to think about”. Perhaps it will go away, we hope. Except it won’t. The west is trillions of dollars in debt, over half the planet can barely feed themselves or not at all, and we place our trust in a few percentage points of economic growth, conveniently forgetting that it was too much faith in growth that got us into this mess in the first place.
The church ought to have a great deal to say about all of this, and ought to be as angry as the Occupiers, but it is stuck in the position of never wanting to take sides. Traditionally, the Church of England has styled itself as the honest broker, a host organisation that stages debates rather than take part in them. Like the BBC, though completely unlike Jesus himself, it is constantly reaching for a sensible balance, defining its position by charting a mean between extremes. This way it justifies its role as an established church. The problem for the Church of England, and specifically for places like St Paul’s, is that this lofty Apollonianism has little to say to angry people other than calm down and (if they won’t) go home.
Following last year’s St Paul’s debacle, Rowan Williams claimed that “the Church of England is still used by British society as a stage on which to conduct by proxy the arguments that society itself does not know how to handle”. But we have to be so much more than a high-class debating society. As the Occupiers reminded the church today, Jesus angrily ejected the moneychangers from the temple. It’s hard to imagine circumstances in which the Church of England would ever do the same.
Category : Stocks
 Christian Science Monitor |
A big, angry Indonesian protest you may have missed (video)
Christian Science Monitor A small protest outside the US Embassy in Jakarta last Monday (the original version of this story said “Friday,” apologies) was rolled into the global Islamopocalypse coverage. Old friend Arian Ardie pointed out on Facebook that an angry, mostly-Muslim … A Field Guide to the Mid East Mess — Part I Violent Muslim Protests US activist says he was deceived over anti-Muslim film Category : World News Rovio releases its first non-Angry Birds title in three years, but Apple users report problems with the new game. Go here to read the rest: Angry Birds maker’s new franchise
Angry investors may launch lawsuits, even as Facebook’s latest apology to users comes over unilateral changes to email IDs Facebook received a mixed report card Wednesday from analysts at the banks that worked on its controversial share sale. Stock exchange rules have kept them quiet for 40 days but by lunchtime analysts at the banks that had worked on Facebook’s initial public offering had published their first reports on the company. Eight said “buy”, nine said “hold” and one, BMO Capital Markets, issued the equivalent of a rare “sell”. Facebook’s shares were priced at $38 a piece when the company went public in May. After a disastrous debut they fell as low as $25 but have since recovered to $32. The new analysts’ reports set targets for the shares between $25 and $45, with the average $37.71. Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter on the IPO, set its price at $38 for the next 12 months, ie exactly where it began. The bank and others now face lawsuits from investors angry about Facebook’s disappointing sale. Bankers at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan were more bullish, setting targets of $45 over 18 months and $42 over the next year, respectively. The most negative report was from Daniel Salmon at BMO. Salmon set a price of $25 arguing user growth was slowing and Facebook would struggle in a tougher market for internet advertising sales. The reports came as Facebook was forced to apologise after changing the email people displayed on their profiles. On Monday the firm started changing the email addresses displayed on a user’s account to an @facebook.com account. Facebook users’ other email addresses were hidden by a change in settings that the company said were easily reversed, and were meant to add greater consistency to the way information is displayed on the service. The company said in hindsight it could have explained the changes more fully.
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