Thursday, April 5, 2007

05 Apr 2007 03:34 pm

A Gay Mafia?

Only if you have no idea what you're talking about.

05 Apr 2007 03:32 pm

British Parenting

What children? You could put this down to modernity, but traditional English parents, especially among the elites, always treated their children distantly.

05 Apr 2007 01:38 pm

Witness

A Christian reader writes:

One of your last lines in the latest reply to Sam Harris is:

"But in these matters of ultimate meaning, being persuasive is not as important as being right, is it?" 

I agree. But as a Christian I also know that I am not always right, so being right is less important than being forgiven. And, after all, being persuasive is a good thing, too, but in these matters it is perhaps mostly unachievable.  Christ himself sent missionaries out to preach his Gospel. Their job was to bear witness of what they had seen and heard, and to teach what Jesus taught, but their words did far less to convert than did the Spirit.

A good missionary doesn't say, "So let me show you why you're wrong," or even "Let me show you why I'm right." The best missionaries say, "This is what I experienced" or even "This is what I saw" (with care taken never to bear false witness). You have been, especially in your last two messages to Sam, a good missionary.

Let me put it another way. If you had been alive during the ministry of Paul, and you heard him speak about his experience on the road to Damascus, would you have believed him?  Almost certainly not. What you would have believed would have been what was happening inside yourself. The Gospel is logical and makes sense, but conversion is spiritual and happens within us. You might have said, "Well, his story is incredible, yet I felt something inside that told me it was true." Sam has helped put you in touch with that experience, so although he did not wish it he has acted as a missionary, too.

05 Apr 2007 01:33 pm

Frothing

Clive Davis has a post from London, contrasting British conservative reactions to the Iran deal with American conservatives, including some British ex-pats. He emails despairingly:

It's amazing how US conservatives have managed to alienate so many of us over here.

Ahem.

05 Apr 2007 12:50 pm

McCarthy and Geneva

He responds to my response here. For the time being, I'l link to Scott Horton's post about the original McCarthy essay here. I'll tackle the issues on which Andy and I still differ soon. I think the Iranian breach of Geneva may be a helpful opportunity to revisit this debate. But I'm a little frazzed from defending the existence of God in time for lunch.

05 Apr 2007 11:57 am

Deus Caritas Est

Dear Sam,

My apologies again for the late response to your last post. Work squats on my life. Let me tackle your first points first. I argued that because we may be programmed by evolution for faith, faith may be intrinsic to being human and therefore something we should engage rather than deny. You make the solid point that we are also programmed by evolution for rape. Does that make rape defensible? Of course not, even though, as you point out, rape is a very effective and very natural way to disseminate DNA. But my response would not be to say that the evolutionary impulse to inseminate should be resisted entirely. I'd argue that the sex rive should be channeled respectfully toward others, i.e. moderated. So rape cedes to consensual DNA dissemination. Similarly, the drive for faith needs to be channeled respectfully toward others, i.e. moderated. Fundamentalism cedes to toleration. Hence my insistence on maintaining the humility apropriate for such immense claims about the meaning of everything; and hence my support for a faith that is live-and-let-believe in its social manifestation. I think my project in this respect is far more feasible than yours. By attempting to abolish rather than moderate faith, I fear you deliver an intrinsic human impulse into the hands of those who most abuse it - the fundamentalists of all stripes.

You then ask why I should find it is so hard to imagine my non-existence? Your good points have made me realize more fully why I feel the way I do. The reason I find it so hard to imagine, I realize, is that I believe that God loves me - which is, helpfully, relevant to your subsequent argument. You posit the following options, and ask me to choose:

    (1) There is no God.

    (2) There is a God, but all of our religions have distorted Her reality. Jesus was just an ordinary prophet who happened to become the center of a myth-making cult. God loves everyone and has never been concerned about what a person believes. After death, all people, Christians and non-Christians, simply merge with the Deity in a loving embrace.

    (3) Christianity is the one true religion, and Catholics have the truest version of it.

You want me to say (3) and I will, but I hope to do so in a way that explains my faith a little better. There are, I think, many other options for human beings with respect to faith. Here's my version of the options:
             

                (1) There is no God.

    (2) There are many gods.

    (3) There is a God and it is evil.

    (4) There is a God, but all of our religions have distorted Her reality. Jesus was just an ordinary prophet who happened to become the center of a myth-making cult. God loves everyone and has never been concerned about what a person believes. After death, all people, Christians and non-Christians, simply merge with the Deity in a loving embrace.

    (5) There is a God, but all of our religions have distorted Her reality. Jesus was a man more suffused with divinity than any other human being who has ever lived. God loves everyone and has never been concerned about what a person believes, except that a person know God and accept God's love freely and expresses that love toward everyone he or she encounters. Jesus uniquely showed us how to accept God's love and how to be worthy of it. After death, all people, Christians and non-Christians, simply merge with the Deity in a loving embrace. But Jesus was the proof that such love exists, and that it is divine and eternal, and that it cares for us.

    (6) None of us knows anything about these things.

I guess I've tipped my hand by endorsing (5) but acknowledging the wisdom of (6). The reason I cannot conceive of my non-existence is because I have accepted, freely and sanely, the love of Jesus, and I have felt it, heard it, known it. He would never let me go. And by never, I mean eternally. And so I could never not exist and neither could any of the people I have known and loved.

For me, the radical truth of my faith is therefore not that God exists, but that God is love (a far, far less likely proposition). On its face, this is a preposterous claim, and in my defense, I have never really argued in this dialogue that you should not find it preposterous. It can be reasoned about, but its truth itself is not reasonable or reachable through reason alone. But I believe it to be true - not as a fable or as a comfort or as a culture. As truth. And one reason I am grateful for this discussion is that you take this truth claim seriously on its own terms.

What did Jesus do? The first and immense thing is that he existed at all. Here's how I put it in my book:

"This, it seems to me, is the true mystery of the incarnation, the notion that in Jesus, God became man. I believe this in the only way I can: that one man represents, for all time, God's decision to truly be with us. The reason I call myself a Christian is not because I manage to subscribe, at any given moment, to all the truths that the hierarchy of my church insists I believe in, let alone because I am a good person or a "good Catholic." I call myself a Christian because I believe that, in a way I cannot fully understand, the force behind everything decided to prove itself benign by becoming us, and being with us. And as soon as people grasped what had happened, what was happening, the world changed forever. The Gospels - all of them, including some that were rejected by the early Church - are mere sketches of a life actually lived, and an experience that can never be reduced to words or texts or doctrines...

In this nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important then theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. It is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid. There is another way. For Christians, that other way is about a man, Jesus, whose individuality and humanity cannot be abstracted. And it is about a commemoration of that man, as he asked us to commemorate him - in a meal, a breaking of bread, a Seder-made-new, the mass, as Catholics have come to understand it. This is my faith, if I were forced to describe it."

This is what Jesus told people: to treat God as an intimate father, to pray simply, to believe against so much evidence that good does indeed prevail against evil, to know that God is not indifferent to us, and to re-enact his last meal for ever as a way to remind ourselves of his love and experience his real presence. And this is what Jesus lived: a life full of love and friendship and self-giving, even to the point of non-violent submission to violence, as proof of God's love. I do not need the proof of miracles to believe this. The universe itself is a miracle to me. If there are aspects of it that science has not yet grasped but that believers have somehow glimpsed, then I am content to allow for the possibility of miracles. But I have not witnessed any but the normal ones: the miracle of the blossoms out of my widow at this time of year or the miracle that someone else actually loves me unconditionally, or the miracle of a newborn child. This is miracle enough for me. Or in the saying attributed to John Donne:

"There is nothing that God has established in a constant course of nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seem a miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once."

The resurrection? Yes. But I see it as no more and no less remarkable than the incarnation - and it is, in many ways, the only possible consequence of the incarnation. The Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles provide contradictory accounts of what the resurrection actually was. Jesus appeared in the guise of others, as a vision, as a fully physical entity, and in other ways that defy science and logic. I don't know how to understand it except as a mystery. But I do believe in the empty tomb as much as I believe in the cramped manger. They go together - marks of an appearance in human history as mysterious as the divine must always be to human minds.

To your specific challenges, I think I addressed the moderation vs fundamentalism argument at the beginning of this missive.

Is the Bible uniquely the word of God? Yes - but it was also first spoken and then written by human beings. I don't believe in its inerrancy or its literal truth. But I believe in the deepest truths of the Gospels, and the truth of the life and death of the man they describe. Has God spoken to us in other ways? Of course. But for me, the words of Jesus speak of God's love more truly than anything else I have ever come across. I'm still looking.

Contingency? An eternal truth has to enter human discourse at one time or another. It will become necessarily contingent as soon as it touches the human and becomes part of history. There is no other way. So faith's contingency is neither an argument for or against it.

Other religions. I'm curious. And I find in many of them many of the themes of Jesus: the unimportance of wordliness, the oneness of God, the equal dignity of human beings, the impulse to charity. But I do find Christ's witness the final truth, which must mean that others fall short. But I do not see this as a reason to hate or condemn or even deny the alternatives, where they also see this deeper truth. Everything is true as long as it isn't taken to be anything more than it is. And I am in no position to judge the sincere choices of others in matters inherently beyond our knowledge.

Cultural success? I agree that such success doesn't actually prove anything about a faith. But it is a sign that a truth has endured the test of time and is more than a sudden spasm of fashion. That the life of Jesus has altered human history in ways rarely equaled is indisputable. That's not dispositive, but it is something.

Perhaps, then, Sam, we have talked as much as we fruitfully can. I have to say I am deeply grateful for the opportunity. Those of us who say we have faith are not often challenged as forcefully as you have done for me in your book and in this dialogue. It may frustrate you to know that I have actually found this exchange to be supportive of my own belief. Being forced to defend my faith in public, when usually it lies in the inarticulate folds of private experience, has been a difficult but useful exercize. I'm afraid I haven't persuaded anyone - or maybe led a few to your side of the equation. But in these matters of ultimate meaning, being persuasive is not as important as being right, is it? Thanks for helping me get closer to that ideal. But my doubt, which is a part of my faith, still gets in the way,

cheers,

Andrew

05 Apr 2007 10:54 am

The View From Your Window

St Louis, Missouri, 7 pm.

05 Apr 2007 08:51 am

Andy McCarthy Responds

Here's his piece, defending his stance on torture and "coercive interrogation". On a simple matter of fact,  I should let Andy know that I have indeed written that in the practically non-existent but hypothetically conceivable "ticking bomb" scenario, I do believe a president could legitimately authorize torture and subsequently subject himself and others to the relevant legal penalties. This does not mean, however, that there should be the slightest legal wiggle room for torture or any inhumane treatment of detainees as a matter of standing law or executive prerogative in America, which is why I strongly opposed last year's Military Commissions Act, which gives the president lee-way to torture anyone he decides is an "enemy combatant" at will. McCarthy supported that law, which means he favors torture as a legal option for presidential policy. I don't. Moreover, I do not believe that restoring America's long refusal to torture would "shut down intelligence completely," as Andy would have it. In fact, I think that argument is absurd. We had no viable intelligence in the Cold War or every other conflict the U.S. has fought? The evidence we procure through torture, moreover, is inherently unreliable and dependence on it may actually be hampering better, more serious and more effective ways of gleaning the intelligence that we desperately need. Torture isn't just immoral; it is stupid, clumsy and almost always unproductive.

Andy refers to the precise status of enemy combatants under various Geneva protocols. I'm not a lawyer - but Geneva's baseline protections for detainees plainly do not merely apply to formal POWs in declared wars, but to all human captives in any form of conflict. In previous wars, such as Vietnam and even against Jihadists in Somalia, the US has treated all such captives with baseline Geneva protections against outrages on human dignity and the like. Why? Not because they have a formal status as POWs but because Geneva's baseline protections demand it, and because it is part of the core meaning of this country, part of a military tradition that goes back to George Washington himself, and an integral part of the small progress mankind has made against the forces of barbarism. In any case, Andy concedes that international law protects detainees from abuse and mistreatment and torture, independently of Geneva. So what's he left with exactly? And if you're going to play nit-picking lawyer, as Andy tries to, how exactly do the Geneva Conventions apply to Iran with whom the U.S. is not formally at war? And how does the display and photographing of British prisoners by Iran differ from the photos taken of detainees in Iraq by the US for purposes of potential blackmail and leverage against them? The US government itself released photographs of an imprisoned and humiliated Saddam in his jammies. Under Andy's rules, that was just as big a violation of Geneva as the Iranian abuse of British sailors. Where was his outrage then?

But my broader point was about what the founders dared to call "the opinion of mankind". We are in a propaganda war as well as a military one. In fact, the war of ideas may well be more important in this war than in previous ones, since our only long-term hope of prevailing is talking the majority of Muslims out of the Islamist camp. The damage that legalizing torture has done to this effort and therefore to the war against Islamist terror is incalculable - and Iran's latest p.r. coup just demonstrates how deep the damage is, and how deftly smiling bigots like Ahmadinejad can exploit it. That's why, of course, the Bush administration did all it could to keep the torture hidden in the first place. But in the modern world, such tactics cannot be hidden for very long. Nor can torture ever be contained, as Andy would prefer to have it. Moreover, it hasn't been contained.

Andy is, I'm sure, sincere in his abhorrence of Abu Ghraib. But he still thinks of it as some strange, one-off event unauthorized by anyone. What I fear he hasn't grasped is the clear link between the president's approval of torture and its deployment in that jail, using approved techniques well known by professional torturers everywhere, under a commander selected precisely because of his experience torturing detainees for "intelligence" at Gitmo. I didn't believe it myself at first, until I read the memos and the reports and the increasing mounds of testimony from the torturers and direct witnesses to torture themselves. It is not a pleasant experience, coming to terms with what has been done. But I'm afraid it's a necessity if we are to turn over this awful page and win this war. Right now, we're losing it. And Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and the policies that made them happen are key parts of the reason.

05 Apr 2007 07:50 am

The King Is Not Amused

YouTube gets yanked in Thailand.

05 Apr 2007 07:49 am

Hotel Rwanda

Still controversial.

05 Apr 2007 06:47 am

Pelosi in Syria

Greg Djerejian calls it a Damascene Comedy:

So let me get this straight. Bush remonstrates dastardly Nancy for her passage through Damascus, at the very time the Israelis are reportedly using her to pass a message to Bashar Assad to help avoid a possible conflagration with the Syrians. Soon, Bush will be telling Bibi Netanyahu or Avigdor Lieberman they're wimps, and to hang Crawford tough against the 'Palis' or such.

05 Apr 2007 12:05 am

Cheney in 2008!

The editors of the New York Sun wrote this editorial. For some reason, it's dated three days too late.
 

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

04 Apr 2007 10:11 pm

"Heat" and Androphilia

A reader directs me to the more relevant dialogue between De Niro's character and Pacino's:

MCCAULEY: A guy told me one time - don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out in on 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.  Now if you're on me and you got to move when I move, how do you expect to keep a... a marriage?

HANNA: That's an interesting point. What are you -- a monk?

MCCAULEY: I have a woman.

HANNA: What do you tell her?

MCCAULEY: I tell her I'm a salesman.

HANNA: So, then, if you spot me comin' round that corner, you just gonna walk out on this woman? Without sayin' goodbye?

MCCAULEY: That's the discipline.

HANNA: That's pretty vacant.

MCCAULEY: Yeah. It is what it is. It's that or we both better go do somethin' else, pal.

HANNA: I don't know how to do anythin' else.

MCCAULEY: Neither do I.

HANNA: I don't much want to either.

MCCAULEY: Neither do I...

04 Apr 2007 08:43 pm

The Real Estate Roller Coaster

All aboard! It starts in 1890. (Hat tip: Speculative Bubble.)

04 Apr 2007 08:28 pm

Bi-Racial Madness

A reader writes:

Reading your post made me recall the song "You're an Embarrassment" by the London group Madness back in the 90s - lyrics here. I liked the song but never knew what it was about, but they had the band on a local London radio programme last month and Suggs wrote it about a white female cousin of his who became pregnant with a mixed-race baby. Did the feelings last long he was asked. No, they disappeared immediately the new white grandparents saw the new-born baby, who apparently is now in college and doing fine with a lot of affection from all the family. Which backs up what you say. Nice song too.

04 Apr 2007 07:56 pm

To The Left Of Kos

Robert A. George examines Rudy Giuliani's position on tax-payer funded abortions.

04 Apr 2007 07:20 pm

Christians in Pakistan

An eleven-year-old, among others, is accused of blasphemy.

04 Apr 2007 06:56 pm

Obama Power

He actually beat her in primary dollars. That's a big deal.

04 Apr 2007 06:34 pm

Androphile Movies

A reader writes:

Don't forget to add 'Heat' to that list: two grown men (Pacino and De Niro) abandoning the women in their lives to play hide and go seek with guns. And in the final moment, after Deniro has been fatally wounded, they hold hands and revel in each others heroism: " ... not half bad" says Pacino. "Pretty good your own self" says De Niro. Perfect.

04 Apr 2007 06:24 pm

The Theocon Lament

"I don't mind that some of my conservative friends are for Giuliani, but I do wish they weren't such cheap dates," - Ramesh Ponnuru, reeling from the Giuliani abortion news. I guess there are actually two parties of death now, aren't there?

04 Apr 2007 06:05 pm

Sharafi Released

What to make of this? A deal? Money quote:

Ahmadinejad's announcement came after Iran's state media reported that an Iranian envoy would be allowed to meet five Iranians detained by US forces in northern Iraq in January. Another Iranian diplomat, Jalal Sharafi, separately seized two months ago by uniformed gunmen in Iraq, was released and returned on Tuesday to Tehran.

But the president denied there was any connection, saying, "If we had wanted to exchange Jalal Sharafi with the rest (the Britons) we would have exchanged him for 100,000. But we pardoned them." He said the decision was "based on humanitarian considerations."

The agreement to give Tehran access to the five captured Iranians in Iraq has not been confirmed.

04 Apr 2007 05:54 pm

Rudy and Abortion

According to CNN, he's still for public funding of abortions:

"There must be public funding for abortions for poor women," Giuliani says in the speech that is posted on the video sharing site YouTube. "We cannot deny any woman the right to make her own decisions about abortion."

When asked directly Wednesday if he still supported the use of public funding for abortions, Giuliani said "Yes."

I presume that means a definitive breach with the pro-life base. 

04 Apr 2007 05:20 pm

Blair's Succession Problem

Maybe if he took a hint from Doctor Who ...

Apologies for this spasm of Britishness.

04 Apr 2007 05:05 pm

The Lancet Study

A radio interview with the author. Maybe the 650,000 Iraqi fatalities number is not so crazy after all. If it isn't crazy, then the entire moral compass of this war needs to be reset.

04 Apr 2007 04:40 pm

Face of the Day

A penitent attends church 04 April 2007 before the start of the 'Jesus de la Paciencia' brotherhood procession in Granada, southern Spain, during the Holy Week. The procession was canceled due to bad weather conditions. Photo by Jose Luis Roca/Getty.

04 Apr 2007 04:21 pm

Bob Barr, Reborn

Another conservative abandons the Bush-Rove GOP.

04 Apr 2007 03:55 pm

Hollywood and the Curse of Heterosexuality

Here's an interesting review of "300":

"300" celebrates the male bonding that is found in most war and sports movies.   What gives those films their homosexual subtext is less the sweating, shirtless males working together for victory. Rather it's the unstated assumption that unlike the men, none of the women in these men's lives will ever really grasp this singularly important, defining experience. Whatever these men and their future wives share, the women will just never "get it." However, in war and sports films, the men still hunger for a life of normalcy - settling down and raising a family with their female soulmate. But that fantasy of living happily ever after with your true love has little emotional resonance in contemporary buddy films and  romances: think The Break Up, Failure to Launch, Old School, Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, American Pie.   

It wasn't always so. In '50's and '60's films, the emotional relationship that men craved was with a woman. Then two films undermined that assumption. For the artier crowd, "Diner" depicted male friendships as deeper than anything that a man could share with a woman. For the mass audience, the same message was abundantly clear with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. No woman could ever be as perfect for Redford or Newman as they were for each other.

In that sense, Brokeback Mountain wasn't so much about being gay; it was about being male, in ways that women can never understand. Maybe the chick flick has produced its mirror image: the dick flick.

04 Apr 2007 03:50 pm

Obamarama!

His website celebrates his money bonanza. There are donor stories, photos, videos, and blogs. Again: the guy's a pro. And the campaign is beginning to feel like an RFK 1968 re-run (and I hope his security detail is top notch). If you fall into the Anyone-But-Clinton camp, and I'm afraid I do, this is good news.

(Photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty.)

04 Apr 2007 03:49 pm

Edible Ads

They're coming:

"You open up a magazine, there's a small plastic thing in there, and you rip it open. It looks like a cheeseburger, tastes like a cheeseburger, it's made from all organic ingredients."

Blech.

(Hat tip: Kottke.)

04 Apr 2007 03:26 pm

Mike's Last Interview

Michael Kelly - unplugged, from a month and a half before he was killed in Iraq. I really really wish Mike were alive. Not just because he was Mike and was loved and had a wife and kids. But because I'd love to know what he'd have made of the last four years, where he would have ended up on this war, what he would have said about Abu Ghraib, the occupation, the failure to find WMDs and any other number of topics. But we will never know, and, knowing Mike, we'd be fools to guess as well.

04 Apr 2007 03:17 pm

A Quid Pro Quo?

Was there a deal done behind closed doors with Tehran? Scott Horton picks up on some signs.

04 Apr 2007 02:57 pm

Advantage Ahmadinejad

We'll have to see what actually happened behind the scenes in the welcome release of British soldiers before we can figure out who blinked and when. But the spectacle today is one of Ahmadinejad milking the moment for all its worth. The public apologies by the sailors, the choreographed television shots, the use of the word "detainee" to describe the Brits, and the Easter "gift:" this is all propaganda for the Tehran thugocracy. Ahmadinejad has used the Revolutionary Guards to buttress his domestic support with this spectacle, but he may have had to make some concessions internally. We'll see. But I don't see how the U.S. benefits from this fiasco in any way. Tehran successfully weaned Britain away from its ally, the U.S., and its EU partners, proved how alienated the British public is from the war in Iraq and the U.S. administration, managed to look more humane in prisoner treatment than the U.S. and distracted from the growing international pressure on Tehran's nuclear ambitions. That's a pretty shrewd set of moves, though it pains me to say so.

The only downside for Ahmadinejad was his ugly, stupid statement about women servicemembers. But it may go down well with the D'Souzaite masses in the Middle East. It's infuriating that this little religious nut-case is running rings around the West in p.r. But that says more about the failures of the West in this war than about the brilliance of the mullahs in Tehran.

(Photo: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meets with a British sailor (left) following his press conference in Tehran, where he announced the release of the 15 British sailors, 04 April 2007. Ahmadinejad met the sailors as they were released at the presidential compound, wishing them success for the future, state television pictures showed. Amid smiles, cheerful conversations then followed between Ahmadinejad and four sailors who were filmed queuing up to shake his hand. By STR/AFP/Getty.)

04 Apr 2007 02:44 pm

Republican Meltdown

Even JPod can see the damage Bush has wrought to Republican prospects.

04 Apr 2007 02:27 pm

Biracial Kids

Here's an interesting study of how black and white relatives feel about biracial children. Opposition to inter-racial marriage - much more intense in the 1950s and 1960s than opposition to gay marriage today - is based primarily on the issue of the children. Isn't it "selfish" for an interracial couple to have children? The linked study finds that this attitude, while common before marriage and kids, tends to melt with the actual arrival of a multiracial child. When the abstract becomes concrete and human, the prejudice dissolves. The same is true, I think, of gay parenting. In the abstract, some people have issues. When confronted with the reality of gay parenting, when you get to see and meet the actual children, so much fear and prejudice melts away. Of course this doesn't mean that multi-racial kids are the solution to the problem of racism. They're human beings. They're not a solution to anything. They just are.

04 Apr 2007 02:08 pm

O'Reilly Loses It

His explosion shows just how sensitive the issue of the Geneva Conventions is becoming. It is simply very difficult for the US - especially the pro-Bush brigades - to invoke the Geneva Conventions in the British-Iran case after the contempt they have shown for Geneva these past few years. This is blowback time. It was always going to come, and now we see it. O'Reilly should not be angry at someone defending Geneva; he should be furious that the Bush administration has handed the enemy such an obvious propaganda coup.

04 Apr 2007 01:28 pm

In Defense of the EU

A reader writes:

It is easy enough to drag out the PC punching bag to make a point about those too-sensitive Europeans whose mis-guided sensibilities will only harm themselves. Another (and to my mind equally compelling) reading of the phrase "terrorists who abusively invoke Islam" is that it is strategic: it creates another Islam, a Reformationist Islam, that rejects murder and terror as an arm of religious identity. The phrase isolates the actors, the terrorists, and what they want the most, to speak for Islam itself. "Terrorists who abusively invoke Islam" highlights what they are: thugs and murderers. It makes explicit what they do to justify their thuggery: abusively invoke Islam. It is a phrase that looks forward to a time where the Islamic Enlightenment has taken hold and a moderate Muslim would bristle at an Islam of terror. The phrase isn't PC. The phrase describes a world that I hope we all want to see come into being.

And, by the way, that is true of Christianity in the West and US Christianity in particular. If only it were the case that the US public understood that "Christian opposition to gay marriage" wasn't at core Christian. If only we lived in a world where the marriage rights for US citizens who are lesbian and gay could be debated in a way that the opposition was understood to be abusively invoking Christianity - not to mention a routine abuse of the document that should guide every citizen's life. And it's not the Bible. It's the Constitution.

I take the point. The question, though, is whether this makes the phrase Orwellian - an attempt to promote a view of the world that isn't yet the case. If that obscures reality, then language isn't doing the job it should.

04 Apr 2007 01:03 pm

Two Iraqs

This ABC News report from Baghdad was easily the most hopeful report I've seen in a long while. The surge may be working in a few Baghdad districts with sufficient man-power - finally! - to restore some kind of order. But at the same time we read that

21 Shia market workers were ambushed, bound and shot dead north of the capital. The victims came from the Baghdad market visited the previous day by John McCain, the US presidential candidate, who said that an American security plan in the capital was starting to show signs of progress.

The Times of London story also contains gruesome details of a truck bomb that killed many children at an elementary school in Kirkuk. The best judgment I can make right now is that a real counter-insurgency plan can and will make a difference where it is actually implemented - as long as it is pursued for an indefinite period with sufficient troop levels. For Iraq as a whole, we're talking 200,000 or more troops for at least five more years. No one in this administration has ever been honest about this, or ever asked for the sacrifices it would entail. And I seriously doubt now whether there will ever be anything close to an American consensus in favor of that - and the expenditure of life and money it would require. What we may be finding out now, in other words, is that this was not an impossible dream. It was simply made impossible by the execution. Which makes the signs of failure and of success all the more excruciating.

04 Apr 2007 12:13 pm

Iraqi Death Stats

There's a big debate in Britain over them. Essentially, the editor of the Lancet has gone nuclear on Blair, turning a highly respected scientific journal into a political weapon. But he has a factual point. The Johns Hopkins study that estimated a human toll of 650,000 Iraqi casualties since the invasion was apparently backed up by Blair's own government scientists, but the prime minister ignored them. I find the number implausible on its face, but I'm not an expert in these things, and no one can doubt that the reality of Iraq is opaque at best. Here's some science-bloggy reax - here, and here.

04 Apr 2007 11:30 am

$25 Million!

Just a million behind Clinton, with a much larger small-donor potential and much wider national appeal: Obama is the Democratic front-runner now. He has even managed the expectations game better than his rival. She panicked and bragged to Drudge. He kept his cool and will now have his own news cycle bump. Obama so far has proven himself a very smooth operator. He doesn't look like the freshman. She does.

(Photo: Jeff Haynes/AFP/Getty.)

04 Apr 2007 11:29 am

Europe Alone

Frank Fukuyama sees the EU, not America, as the model for humanity's future:

The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organisation. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

Finally, I never linked the global emergence of democracy to American agency, and particularly not to the exercise of American military power. Democratic transitions need to be driven by societies that want democracy, and since the latter requires institutions, it is usually a fairly long and drawn out process.

04 Apr 2007 10:49 am

High School Sex

Well, that headline should get some Google traffic. But there's an Ohio State University study of who hooks up with whom in an anonymous high school, and the results don't look like an adult network. Money quote:

For the first time, sociologists have mapped the romantic and sexual relationships of an entire high school over 18 months, providing evidence that these adolescent networks may be structured differently than researchers previously thought.

The results showed that, unlike many adult networks, there was no core group of very sexually active people at the high school. There were not many students who had many partners and who provided links to the rest of the community.

Instead, the romantic and sexual network at the school created long chains of connections that spread out through the community, with few places where students directly shared the same partners with each other. But they were indirectly linked, partner to partner to partner. One component of the network linked 288 students – more than half of those who were romantically active at the school – in one long chain.

You really are sleeping with everyone else your hook-up may have slept with. The lack of any hub makes intervention to prevent STD spread much harder. You have to come up with a general message rather than targeting a small group first. Why so few gays? It's high school, I guess. And all of this is based on reported hook-ups, so who knows what the reality truly is.

04 Apr 2007 10:21 am

The View From Your Window

London, England, 1 pm.

04 Apr 2007 09:51 am

Quote for the Day II

"I know my position on anti-war protestors a few years back- they were to be mocked, derided, ignored, out-protested, or countered with 'facts' (the facts, in many cases, did not turn out to be on my side, but at least I was arguing from what I thought was an honest position). Nowhere did I even begin to imagine we would arrest people and have them interrogated by secret government units.

But the smelly dirty hippies were expecting it, and once again, this administration has proved them right," - John Cole, Balloon Juice.

04 Apr 2007 09:36 am

Phobiaphobia

Can you be bigoted against homosexuals and Muslims at the same time?

04 Apr 2007 08:06 am

Quote for the Day

"I favor redistribution from the rich to the poor.  It will make the poor better off for a few decades, but no more. After that point, the poor are worse off, forever, and by more each year," - Tyler Cowen, mouthing off again. Commenters at Reason have various calves here. Ezra Klein has a heifer.

04 Apr 2007 07:29 am

HPV Vaccine For Guys

Free peanuts! No warts! What's not to like? I love the drug companies.

04 Apr 2007 06:33 am

The PC Police

In Europe, the EU is counseling its members not to use the term "Islamic terrorism." One is now supposed to say ""terrorists who abusively invoke Islam". Bill Poser comments here. Money quote:

"The EU's ostrich-like approach is stupid and dangerous for the way it ignores the very real fact of Islamic terrorism, but it is also linguistically ignorant since the phrase "Islamic terrorism" carries no implication that all Muslims support terrorism or that Islam is particularly associated with terrorism. By the same token, "Christian opposition to gay marriage" does not imply that all Christians are opposed to gay marriage or that Christians are particularly associated with opposition to gay marriage. If one must be politically correct, one should start from a correct understanding of the language at issue."

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

03 Apr 2007 10:42 pm

Quote for the Day

"Let us be clear: Ultimately, this is not about individual criminal acts or individual failures in leadership. This is about the systematic corruption of an institution. This is about the church as a hierarchy and a whole betraying the faith and the faithful in the most serious fashion imaginable. It is about a massively powerful institution using its power to conceal and effectively perpetuate - knowingly perpetuate - crimes (and sins) of the most evil nature against the most innocent and vulnerable of the souls who trusted the church," - Michael Kelly, Washington Post, March 20, 2002.

Mike died in Iraq four years ago today. I don't know a better way to remember him than to reprint one of the many truths he wrote in the online version of the magazine he edited.

03 Apr 2007 10:38 pm

How Powerful Is Sam Tanenhaus?

Plenty, I'd say. And he wields his power judiciously as well. But New York magazine wanted a more definitive answer, as far as debut novelists are concerned.

03 Apr 2007 09:11 pm

KITT For Sale

If you like cars and stuff.