The Servility of the Satellites

[Swagman]

The Servility of the Satellites
by DIANA JOHNSTONE

Paris, France.

The Snowden affair has revealed even more about Europe than about the United States.

Certainly, the facts of NSA spying are significant. But many people suspected that something of the sort was going on. The refusal of France, Italy and Portugal to allow the private aircraft of the President of Bolivia to cross their airspace on the mere suspicion that Edward Snowden might be aboard is rather more astonishing.

Together, these revelations confirm the completion of the transformation of the “Western democracies” into something else, an entity that as yet has no recognized name.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/05/the-servility-of-the-satellites/

[djean111]

2. From what I can find, Hollande is pronounced oh-LAWND. Not too far off, IMO.

What is amazing is that of all the alarming things in that article, how Obama pronounces a French name is evidently the most note-worthy thing.
I have a lot of problems with what Obama is doing, but think it is beyond ridiculous to fasten on to this as somehow important.

[Igel]

3. No, no.

It's really important to pronounce the names of those you empathize with perfectly authentically.

You mustn't anglicize the name to make it fit with English pronunciation norms.

Oddly, only Americans are expected to do this, and writers only insist on it for people that they want to insult over people they want to protect. It helps if the writers know the language(s) involved.

It's a bunch of pharisees calling others philistines. The writers only think they need to do it for languages they know or groups they're "in empathy" with. And only for bad people that they want to insult, esp. if they want others to feel insulted by those bad people. The writers don't feel a need to do it for people like Milosevic or Putin, or anybody Chinese unless they know the languages (even then, they typically don't because it sounds foppish or pendantic to codeswitch between English and a non-stylish language). The writers are hypocriical, hence pharisaical. And they always do it to show that others are inferior to them and their readers. Hence we have a pharisee calling somebody else a philistine. They demand a perfection that they have no intention of expecting from themselves or those they are in solidarity with.

Obama's pronunciation of "Hollande" was no worse than Hollande's pronunciation of "Obama." Except to those neurotically oversensitive or trying to find fault for the sake of finding fault or producing outrage over something that doesn't merit much notice.