Thursday, February 22, 2007

22 Feb 2007 06:53 pm

Modernity's End?

Here's a challenging essay by Michael Vlahos in the American Conservative, a magazine that for all its troubling underbelly, is taking intellectual risks not seen in more established venues like the Weekly Standard or National Review. I'm not sure what to make entirely of this long, rambling piece. But it stimulates, and has echoes of D'Souza's call for a grand alliance between American social conservatives and Muslim anti-secularists. Money quote:

Modernity's greatest failure is spiritual—neon-lit in Europe, where old piety has crashed and burned. But among the global other scorched by modernity's 'creative destruction,' it is not that people have abandoned piety but that it has abandoned them. In globalization's mixing bowl, the meditative power of old ethos has been lost. Yet American modernity offers nothing to take its place: just ask an Afghani or an Iraqi.

Piety is a cry for meaning in a stripped world. Two movements stand out: the Pentecostalist and the Islamist. Both share a deep repudiation of the Western nation state as the supreme human ideal — not because they are intrinsically anti-Western but because they see modernity as antithetical to what people need. If this seems harsh, just feel the fervor and the fulfillment they offer.

Calling them throwbacks from a primitive past denies what we need to see: that modernity itself has been stripping, not giving. Denial robs us of insight into what people need, while calling their piety 'primitive' encourages us to see the global other as a lesser humanity. We have after all declared that the lowest bar we will accept for Muslims is 'moderate Islam,' where we will ratify what is correct.

These themes - what globalization has done to the human soul, how fundamentalism has filled the vacuum of meaning in the West and in the developing world, the parallels between Christianism and Islamism - are at the center of my own attempt to think through conservatism again. But Vlahos goes further, seeing in 9/11 an end to America's global modernity-project; and in the war he argues that we have begun an intensification of our undoing. As I said, I need to think this essay over some more. But it provoked in all the right ways.

22 Feb 2007 06:46 pm

Killer Beard

Literally.

22 Feb 2007 05:44 pm

Hardaway Explains

The poor guy thinks he committed a "hate crime." More reason to hate hate crime laws. He also uses this somewhat unfortunate metaphor:

I don't have a hate bone in my body.

Ahem. Money quote:

You know, we were brought up to not even condone or associate yourself with a gay person. If you knew of a gay person, disassociate yourself with them.

But Tim, you've been in Miami for years now and there is a strong and public gay community there. How have you still held on to that same mentality while living in Miami all of these years?

I just get away from it. I just walk away. I see it, I just go the other way, cross the street.

So at no point did you ever try to understand their lifestyle or way of life?

No. Never did. Never wanted to.

I have to say I'm impressed with Hardaway's honesty, and defend his right to his opinions and beliefs, even if I don't share them. I hope he sees that he's missing a lot in excluding gay people from his life, but it's his life, not mine. Leave him alone.

22 Feb 2007 05:22 pm

Face of the Day

Degn Schubert, 40, with hair stylist Kristina Pinto as he prepares for his civil union ceremony with partner Mark Rado that will take place at midnight February 22, 2007 in Asbury Park, New Jersey. The couple had a domestic partnership formed in California June 28, 2003 and celebrate that date as their anniversary. Schubert says, "I'm happy for the couples that are doing it for the first time, but for this one, we're doing it because it allows us more rights." (Photo by Colin Archer/Getty Images)

22 Feb 2007 04:48 pm

"Acting White"

This African-American blogger does not recall that in his high school, black achievers were ridiculed for "acting white." But he knows many other African-Americans who testify that this is indeed a damaging phenomenon and that Barack Obama is right to talk about and tackle it as a cultural burden on young black Americans. Then James Forman Jr notices a possible explanation for the discrepancy between his experience and so many others': he went to an all-black school. Data back this up.

22 Feb 2007 04:20 pm

Nixon Camp

Who can resist?

22 Feb 2007 04:19 pm

Concerned Women About Commentary

It's always good for a new blog to stir up some debate. Gary Rosen's piece on public religion and Concerned Women for America seems to have done the trick. Congrats, Contentions.

22 Feb 2007 04:14 pm

Ross on Wallace

My colleague, Ross Douthat, sees nothing wrong with the Wallace ad below.

22 Feb 2007 03:59 pm

Beards!

Here's more than you ever wanted to see or know. But I'm completely hooked. Beards are not easy things to grow, groom or tender. But this site helps you stay focused; and even provides several success stories. Here's one, for example. Money quote:

Has the site's information on beard grooming been useful?

I've tried many times to grow a beard - and never really understood the importance behind grooming or choosing a style that added to the shape, contours and symmetry of my face. In early attempts, I always trimmed back my beard by simply shaving the areas where I wanted to shape an outline of what I thought would look good -- this was universally unsuccessful and would always result in my shaving the entire beard off (leading to much comment from work colleagues, family and friends -- usually accompanied with a "thank god" or "that looks much better" -- without the beard). As I finally let my beard grow, grooming became a deliberate expression of some personal aesthetic. I invested in a beard trimmer after six scruffy weeks and quickly learned how to keep my beard shaped and defined in a way that pleased me.

Mark Steyn's is hot, by the way. I hope he never culls it.

22 Feb 2007 03:33 pm

The Dangers of Fake Faith

One of the problems of the weakening of traditional religion is the emergence of fake religions. Michael Burleigh's book on "Sacred Causes" links the rise of pseudo-religions like Soviet Marxism and German Nazism to the vacuum created by declining traditional religious commitment in twentieth century Europe. There's a useful summary of the book in today's WSJ. (The book, alas, is not Burleigh's best.) But this is not, I think, a defense of some of contemporary American evangelicalism, let alone contemporary Wahhabism or Salafism. Some strands of today's American evangelicalism are as phony and as fake as any atheistic alternative from the last century. The "Prosperity Gospel," for example, is not Christianity. It's a form of capitalist self-help under-pinned by emotional manipulation, legitimized by the patina of Christian scripture. Similarly, a Christian faith that is primarily about politics and social policy is not authentic faith either: it's Christianism, not Christianity. That's one reason, I think, that non-fundamentalist Christians should stay in established traditional churches and resist the fundamentalist onslaught. Institutions matter. Religion matters. A society that severs the two is prone to dangerous bouts of ill-considered zeal and far-too ideological politics. We're not there yet. But the danger signs are flashing red.

22 Feb 2007 02:51 pm

Steyn and Bosnia

More evidence that he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about:

I agree with your reader's assessment of Bosnian Muslim and Serb dynamics in your post. My mother suggested evidence from the Croatian point of view, as well. She's from Zagreb. She said the Hercegovinian Croats who moved to Zagreb were much more ambitious and "good at business" than the Croats from Croatia, and for that reason resented. But she said that the Muslims in Bosnia were considered to be even more ambitious and better at business than the Croats there--they were called "the Jews of Bosnia" (ironic, considering the generalized antipathy between Jews and Muslims today) for their business and financial prowess.

Memo to Steyn: some anti-Muslim bigotry is a lot like the old anti-Semitism. You need to be a little more careful who you're rooting for.

22 Feb 2007 01:55 pm

T.C. Republicans

Terry Jeffrey makes a pragmatic case for sticking to t.c. (theologically correct) politics:

Bottom line question: If the GOP runs a candidate such as Rudy Giuliani, who mirrors the Democratic candidate's liberal positions on key social issues, and who will not benefit from the presence of a marriage amendment on the ballot, does the GOP increase or decrease its chances of winning Ohio?

Running against a senator who just won a landslide reelection in New York, Giuliani is far more likely to paint Ohio blue than his home state red.

Kate O'Beirne is concerned that a socially inclusive Catholic like Giuliani could expose the extremism of theoconservative politics. She's right. It's one reason I find Giuliani appealing.

22 Feb 2007 01:18 pm

Class War in Britain

An outbreak!

22 Feb 2007 12:43 pm

The Allies

The small British withdrawal from Basra is not a watershed. Its miminal nature and indeterminate timing make it the least that Blair can still do to appease the overwhelming sense of public opinion in Britain, while not rupturing the alliance, or leaving irresponsibly. It is not, whatever the unhinged vice-president says, a sign of great success. Blair, a man of good faith who is yet another victim of this presidency, was candid about that:

"What all this means is not that Basra is how we want it to be," Mr. Blair said, "but it does mean that the next chapter in Basra's history can be written by Iraqis." The city, he said, "is still a difficult and dangerous place."

What's more telling is how unpopular the war is in Britain, and how an entire generation of Brits have now grown up thinking of the United States as a bullying, torturing force for instability in the world. That's not the America I love - but it is the image of America that Bush and Cheney have built for the largest generation of human beings ever to grow up on the planet. In Italy, the government has fallen because there is no longer support for even a minimal presence in Afghanistan, let alone Iraq.

Soft power can be over-hyped. It's no substitute for military prowess. But soft power still matters. Once, for all the residual anti-Americanism out there, it was a significant plus for the U.S. Bush has somehow managed to give the U.S. a soft-power deficit - in a war against some of the most barbaric, evil enemies we have ever faced. That really is an achievement. And it will take another generation to fix it. It's one reason Obama is so appealing, I think. Electing him after Bush-Cheney would amount to the strongest signal that America is moving past the Bush-Cheney era. That's a message the world is desperate to hear, and it would make enlisting more allies in the war against Islamist terror much easier.

(Photo: Peter McDiarmid/Getty.)

22 Feb 2007 12:33 pm

Libby Update

It doesn't look like a quick verdict. The jury has requested a "large flip chart, marking tape, post-it notes" and "any one of the documents where there are pictures of the witnesses." PDF documents here and here.

22 Feb 2007 11:50 am

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib

HBO has an important documentary debuting tonight at 9.30 pm on the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld policy of torturing terror suspects. It's directed by Rory Kennedy. Here's a brief interview with her. She began the documentary interested in the psychology of people who torture others. But when torturer after torturer told her that they were following instructions, she pursued an investigation. Some don't want us to go there. Some want to euphemize it. Some want to describe it as self-actuated. The evidence won't allow us such easy outs. This happened. It was policy. Under mercifully more constrained conditions, it still is. And something deep in America has died. We can, I think, discuss whether such a shift away from America's historic abhorrence of torture is somehow necessary. But before we can debate that, we have to face the truth. America is now a torturing nation.

22 Feb 2007 11:28 am

The View From Your Window

Albany, New York, midnight.

22 Feb 2007 11:05 am

Ridiculous Cheney

The war between Cheney and McCain went up a notch again yesterday, and I'm glad McCain isn't taking the abuse and condescension lying down. Money quote:

When asked about the administration's environmental record, Mr. McCain said, "I would assess this administration's record on global warming as terrible."

Asked by a reporter about his comments about Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. McCain said, "The criticism of the conduct of the war I have voiced for more than three years when I saw that this train wreck was taking place."

Some minutes later, after the news conference had ended, Mr. McCain, unbidden, said to the reporter, "Sir, I stand by my comments about Secretary Rumsfeld, by the way."

It's good to see a simple and accurate phrase deployed to describe the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq: a train wreck. It's also good to see a leading Republican place the blame squarely on Rumsfeld. McCain, it seems to me, grasps two essential facts in a way few others do. Those two facts are that America is a nation dedicated to the rule of law; and we are engaged in a lethal war with ruthless and fanatical enemies. He also believes in crafting domestic policy to address actual problems, rather than to support electorally important constituencies. His isolation in today's Republican party is a sign of its sickness, not health. And the compromises the man has made to stay even faintly viable in such an atmosphere have made that sickness worse.

I should add that, at this point, the vice-president should have the self-respect to keep his views to himself. He does not realize it but he is a ridiculous figure. The record of his public statements over the last few years, from the idiotic "last throes" comment to the absurd "enormous successes" boast have rendered him a deeply unserious public official. The fact that he is ridiculous does not, alas, make him any the less dangerous to the constitution or to the successful conduct of the war. There is plenty of damage he can still wreak, given the chance.

22 Feb 2007 10:29 am

Campaign Ad Schlock

You thought Bob Corker was unscrupulous? You don't remember George Wallace. (Well, I was five and in England.)

22 Feb 2007 09:56 am

The View From the Base

Jonah Goldberg runs an interesting email from a partisan Republican. It reminds me how much the base really does suspect McCain. Money quote:

The big problem with McCain is that he repeatedly takes a high profile stand for the Democrats on important partisan issues. He does this on important policies like W's tax cuts and torture legislation, and of course campaign finance. Even on the war he has often given credibility to the left's rhetoric about Rumsfeld, torture, administration incompetence, etc., even though he's been solid on the core substance. Its not just that he occasionally votes with the Democrats, its that he's willing to become their chief spokesman when he does it. Sure he may hold conservative views on 80% of the issues, but the other 20% seems to be what he really cares about.

What's interesting to me is that the writer doesn't actually discuss the merits of the issues involved. On the vital matter of a critical war, what is important is not whether a Republican senator address failures or missteps, but that he either support the administration's talking points or side with the Democrats. That's the only relevant choice. You see here the poisonous influence of faction, as the founders feared, inhibiting critical debates about strategy in wartime. But it is good to see more candor from the emailer. The president has indeed proposed and had enacted "torture legislation". The bad news is that the mainstream right now acknowledges the authorization of torture and supports it.

22 Feb 2007 09:41 am

Hayek for Dummies

"The Road To Serfdom" in cartoons. Just 18 pages!

22 Feb 2007 08:52 am

The Antidote to HRC

There is hope for the gay rights movement - just don't expect it from the failed Hillary cronies at the Human Rights Campaign. Here's a fascinating piece by Josh Green in the new Atlantic on the efforts of mega-wealthy Tim Gill, founder of Quark, to jump-start gay political organizing. Believe it or not, Gill's people are actually organizing in several states; they have outreach to ... Republicans! And they are getting results. Money quote:

In 2000, [Gill] gave $300,000 in political donations, which grew to $800,000 in 2002, $5 million in 2004, and a staggering $15 million last year, almost all of it to state and local campaigns... On Election Day, fifty of the seventy targeted candidates were defeated, Danny Carroll among them; and out of the thirteen states where Gill and his allies invested, four — Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Washington — saw control of at least one legislative chamber switch to the Democratic Party.

But Gill is too smart to believe that gay equality will be achieved through the Democratic party alone. He comes from a Republican family, has made some key Republican hires, and hopes one day to give equally to both parties. It's an obvious strategy - focused, bipartisan, local. Funny how the Human Rights Campaign has sucked millions out of gay wallets and never achieved anything like this success. Still, they have a big new building, more fundraisers than lobbyists, and lots of jobs lined up for the Hillary administration. By their own objectives, they're doing fine. But their record in national legislation? Close to absolutely nothing.

22 Feb 2007 06:59 am

Bush, Blair, Timetables

A chronology.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

21 Feb 2007 09:08 pm

Alterman

It's good to see I still irritate the bejeezus out of him. Memo to Eric: you don't have to read this, you know. And thanks, Ann.

21 Feb 2007 07:37 pm

Closing Arguments

David Corn has a very helpful summary of the closing arguments in the Libby trial. I have no idea what the jury will find. But I don't think this is a petty issue. I do think that the question of whether the vice-president deliberately misled the president and the country about pre-war WMD intelligence is critical. The Wilson affair is strong circumstantial evidence to me that Cheney had something to hide. Fitzgerald may agree:

Winding up, Fitzgerald aimed at the entire Bush crew. "There's a cloud over the White House as to what happened" in the leak affair, he told the jury. There were questions as to whether the law was broken when Valerie Wilson's CIA cover was blown and "what role the defendant played...what role the vice president played." Looking straight at the jury, Fitzgerald asked, "Don't you think the FBI and the grand jury is entitled to straight answers." Instead, he said, Libby made up a story and obstructed justice. Echoing Wells' last lines, Fitzgerald declared of Libby, "He stole the truth from the judicial system. Give truth back." With that, Fitzgerald was done.

Reasonable doubt? It's a tough hurdle. We may find out no more. But Fitzgerald was absolutely right to try.

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)

21 Feb 2007 05:36 pm

Campaign Ad Schlock

Here's a great one from 1952. No, you're not stoned.

21 Feb 2007 05:06 pm

The Walter Reed Disgrace

A soldier writes:

I honestly believe that the Army is fixing its appalling mess at Walter Reed. But that it took WaPo's Dana Priest to bring it to anyone's attention tells me one thing: that it's been going on a while. The Army is certainly taking the right course on this one - owning up to fault, immediately fixing the situation. But I can't believe for a minute that no one with any real rank had no clue that Soldiers with brain trauma were put in charge of lower ranking Soldiers with equal or worse injuries.  I have no doubt that people knew but were simply overwhelmed with the crush of patient intake. 

Of course, Army Secretary Harvey told WaPo today that the command had NCOs not doing their jobs. With all due respect, Secretary Harvey, that's interesting, but irrelevant. The very idea of blaming subordinate non-commissioned officers is repugnant. They are not commissioned - they are not up for public scrutiny.  Commissioned officers, say, the commander of that hospital or the Army Surgeon General or the Chief of Staff of the Army - or political appointees - they are up for public scrutiny and should be held accountable.  To blame NCOs "not doing their jobs" is the worst kind of passing of the buck and is all to familiar, I'm afraid, for those tied to this administration.

My only hope is that this causes a ground swell of both concern AND action. It's one thing to say "those poor Soldiers. Damn this administration." It's something else entirely to actually do something about it. Start a 501(c)(3) that funnels real help to those Soldiers and Marines who return to face nothing.  Something.  Anything. The Army - given its extremely limited resources faced against the challenge of a multi-front war - clearly can't do it all on its own.

21 Feb 2007 04:46 pm

Islamism Watch

A British Muslim kills his entire family because they were too Western. Money quote:

Mohammed Riaz, 49, found it abhorrent that his eldest daughter wanted to be a fashion designer, and that she and her sisters were likely to reject the Muslim tradition of arranged marriages.

On Hallowe'en last year he sprayed petrol throughout their terraced home in Accrington, Lancashire, and set it alight.

Caneze Riaz, 39, woke and tried to protect her three-year-old child, Hannah, who was sleeping with her, but was overcome by fumes. Her other daughters, Sayrah, 16, Sophia, 13, and Alisha, 10, died elsewhere in the house. Riaz, who had spent the evening drinking, set himself on fire and died two days later.

So much of Islam's violence seems to stem from men's fear of losing control of women.

21 Feb 2007 04:23 pm

Steyn and Bosnia

A reader writes this about Mark Steyn's assertion that Serbian genocide was a response to the Serbs' being "out-bred" by Muslims:

It's true that the demographic balance between Muslims and Serbs shifted. But not because the Muslims had more kids! Quite the opposite.

In Bosnia, the Muslims tended to be richer and better educated ... they were descendants of the old ruling class, after all. They were much more likely to be lawyers, doctors, and other professionals. Bosnian Serbs had originally been the peasant class; their descendants were still more likely to be farmers, or (if educated) soldiers, policemen, or government officials.

So, the Muslims usually had fewer kids than the more rural Serbs. Then why did the number of Serbs decrease? Because the Serbs tended to drift out of Bosnia and into Serbia, especially to Belgrade. That was the capital, the big city with the bright lights. Bosnian Muslims, on the other hand, tended to stay put in Bosnia.

There's a twist here: the Bosnian Serbs who moved to Serbia tended to be the most ambitious and best educated. As a result, the ones left behind grew steadily more rural, backwards and bigoted. And this was a major reason for the violence in Bosnia: the Muslims considered the Serbs a bunch of dumb, violent rednecks, while the Serbs resented the Muslims as a lot of overeducated, snotty ponces. Bosnia wasn't a "clash of civilizations". It was what you get when a culture war turns septic.

And it's one reason to attempt to prevent our own culture war going the same way. The premise of Steyn's entire "argument" is that Muslims will win the civilizational war by "out-breeding" pansy-ass Westerners. There's an interesting debate to be had here, about "natalist" and "non-natalist" societies. But Steyn doesn't come close to grappling with it. It would ruin the gags. I note solely that the words he uses literally dehumanizes the enemy. And it dehumanizes all Muslims, regardless of their sect, politics or assimilation. The use of language to dehumanize the enemy is usually a precursor to abusing or killing them, or acquiescing in both. It is the mark of a deeply illiberal mindset.

21 Feb 2007 04:00 pm

Geffen, Huff and Hill

Meow.

21 Feb 2007 03:38 pm

Chemical Weapons in Iraq

The chaos in Iraq now sees Sunni terrorists using explosives with chemical components. There is such hideous irony here: we invaded to stop a dictator giving chemical weapons to terrorists. But the result of the botched, under-manned occupation is that the terrorists no longer need the dictator to get them. As for the surge, it's whack-a-mole time again:

The geography of the attacks on Tuesday and today — all in the outer ring of neighborhoods around the capital — suggested that the new Baghdad security plan may be pushing violence out to areas outside Baghdad’s central neighborhoods.

Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the chief American military spokesman in the capital, said that military officials have found that as killings and bombings have decreased in Baghdad proper in recent weeks, the fringe areas have seen an increase. Top commanders were considering moving at least one brigade to Diyala Province north of Baghdad, the site of vicious battles between Sunni insurgents and American and Iraqi troops.

21 Feb 2007 03:34 pm

Britain's Big Brother

The police state gains ground in the UK:

For its report the spy watchdog monitored 795 bodies, all of which were empowered to seek out communications data. These included MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, the signals intelligence centre in Cheltenham, as well as 52 police forces, 475 local authorities and 108 other organisations such as the Serious Fraud Office and the Financial Services Authority. Between them they made 439,000 requests for communications information over the 15-month period.

The Home Office said that the total number of such requests, which includes information on e-mail addresses and lists of phone numbers, had not been published before. It was unable to say if this represented a huge increase in data collection.

Gulp.

21 Feb 2007 03:31 pm

Secular Conservatism

In a nutshell. Oh, for the days when conservatives could agree on something.

21 Feb 2007 03:28 pm

Road-Testing Redeployment

Dick Cheney's response to the news that Britain is withdrawing some of its troops from Iraq was interesting. Here it is:

"Well, I look at it and see it is actually an affirmation that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well. In fact, I talked to a friend just the other day who had driven to Baghdad down to Basra, seven hours, found the situation dramatically improved from a year or so ago, sort of validated the British view they had made progress in southern Iraq and that they can therefore reduce their force levels."

Remember that, according to Cheney, the entire war has been an enormous success so far. My bet is that the phony peace prompted by the surge is designed to give Bush and Cheney a moment around May to say about all of Iraq what Cheney has just said about the south. It's fine. We won. We're redeploying. But only the Democrats want to retreat. Remember: the facts in Iraq are irrelevant to Cheney. What matters is domestic politics. And he's setting himself up for a declaration of victory relatively soon. At least one other person on earth will pretend to believe him.

21 Feb 2007 03:16 pm

A World Without America

Some Brits speak up for their ally.

21 Feb 2007 03:00 pm

Sex, Marriage and the Educated Woman

The stereotypes about brainiac, sex-free old maids are well overdue for retirement.

21 Feb 2007 02:35 pm

Closing the Religion Gap

Gary Rosen has some sensible things to say on the current intersection of faith and politics in the culture. As my book makes clear, I'm a defender of people of faith being fully engaged in political debate. Of course our religious views will influence our politics. But the crude invocation of Biblical authority or the recourse to a theologically-based "natural law" - without an attempt to translate such arguments into secular terms that non-believers can understand and engage - is dangerous to democracy. It is, in effect, an end to politics in a religiously and philosophically diverse modernity. Christians have vital things to contribute to public debate. But Christianism - the conflation of faith with politics - is a threat to such debate.

21 Feb 2007 02:04 pm

Kites, Knives, Throats

Islamists are trying to ban the flying of kites in Pakistan. But they may not be the worst threat to the tradition, especially during the festival of Basant which welcomes the spring. Money quote:

Basant's kite flying may have promoted social harmony and moderate society in the past. Unfortunately it does just the opposite today.

Over the past decade, Basant has been hijacked by kite-flying fanatics. Cut throat kite-flyers have been using metal twine. The aim: to cut opponents' kite wires. The collateral damage: hundreds of slit throats. A beautiful cultural tradition has degenerated into a murderous sport. Reports say that hundreds have been killed or wounded when their throats were cut by razor-sharp kite twine.

Mary Poppins meets Quentin Tarantino.

21 Feb 2007 01:38 pm

The Certainty Bias

Here's a fascinating discussion of the way we human beings make judgments and decisions. It's especially useful when thinking about how many of us badly miscalculated Iraq's pre-war WMDs and even how to grapple with the costs and risks of acting now to prevent or ameliorate climate change. Humans like certainty. In areas where we know least we are most intent on it. An experiment unpacks how:

Camerer's experiment revolved around a decision making game known as the Ellsberg paradox. Camerer imaged the brains of people while they placed bets on whether the next card drawn from a deck of twenty cards would be red or black. At first, the players were told how many red cards and black cards were in the deck, so that they could calculate the probability of the next card being a certain color. The next gamble was trickier: subjects were only told the total number of cards in the deck. They had no idea how many red or black cards the deck contained.

The first gamble corresponds to the theoretical ideal of economics: investors face a set of known risks, and are able to make a decision based upon a few simple mathematical calculations. We know what we don't know, and can easily compensate for our uncertainty. As expected, this wager led to the "rational" parts of the brain becoming active, as subjects computed the odds. Unfortunately, this isn't how the real world works. In reality, our gambles are clouded by ignorance and ambiguity; we know something about what might happen, but not very much. (For example, it's now clear just how little we actually knew about Iraq pre-invasion.) When Camerer played this more realistic gambling game, the subjects' brains reacted very differently. With less information to go on, the players exhibited substantially more activity in the amygdala and in the orbitofrontal cortex, which is believed to modulate activity in the amygdala. In other words, we filled in the gaps of our knowledge with fear. This fear creates our bias for certainty, since we always try to minimize our feelings of fear. As a result, we pretend that we have better intelligence about Iraqi WMD than we actually do; we selectively interpret the facts until the uncertainty is removed.

My italics. I think the relationship between fear and the need for certainty is strong. It certainly clouded my judgment after 9/11 and before the Iraq war. And I think extreme fear in the face of globalizing modernity is the deep engine for the rise of religious fundamentalism right now - both Christian and Muslim. In fact, that's the key argument of my book. And the antidote to such fear? A combination of reason, doubt - and existential nerve.

21 Feb 2007 01:17 pm

Touchy Liberals

Another one.

21 Feb 2007 01:09 pm

Face of the Day

A Catholic minister marks with ash the forehead of a female Roman Catholic devotee in the shape of a cross during the observance of Ash Wednesday, 21 February 2007, marking the start of the lenten season. The ash Wednesday ritual symbolizes a penitential system which can be traced to the first century of Christianity when confessions were done publicly. Photo by Luis Liwanaga/AFP/Getty.

21 Feb 2007 12:52 pm

The Public Is With Romney

Most Americans think atheists have no place in the public office as well. Whatever you say about Romney, he's done the polling. And the polling alone will tell you what his positions are. I know he's being trashed at the moment - but a man with these few principles, capable at management and adept at pandering? He's got a golden future in politics.

21 Feb 2007 12:27 pm

Clinton's Military Casualties

The New York Sun piece that argued that military casualties in the Clinton years compared unfavorably with military deaths in Iraq under president Bush is based on data that can be found here (PDF). As I suspected, almost all the deaths are either from illness, accident, suicide, or homicide. A total of 59 were caused by enemy action from 1993 - 1999. It is perfectly possible to make an intellectually honest case that the media pay too much attention to military deaths in wartime. Alicia Colon didn't manage it.

21 Feb 2007 12:16 pm

The View From Your Window

Glasgow, Scotland, noon.

21 Feb 2007 11:54 am

In Defense of Hardaway

Michael Medved sees the good side of the basketball player:

Recent comments by retired basketball star Tim ('I hate gay people') Hardaway did serious damage to his image and career but also unwittingly raised serious cultural issues about sexuality and gender. Hardaway appropriately apologized for his harsh remarks, but many (if not most) Americans no doubt share his instinctive reluctance to share showers and locker rooms with open homosexuals...

When Hardaway says 'I hate gay people' what he suggests at the deepest level is that he feels revolted by the very notion of same-sex eroticism and that he'd prefer not to face the distraction of such thoughts in the locker room or on the court. In this sense, the reluctance to team (in athletics or the military) with announced homosexuals isn't bigotry, it's common sense.

I notice that nowhere in his column does Medved criticize an expression of hatred for homosexuals. It was the harshness of its expression he objected to.

21 Feb 2007 11:25 am

Persians Speak

A group of Persian intellectuals in the country and in exile have published an open letter taking the Tehran regime to task for its disgusting conference on the Jewish Holocaust. It's an encouraging read. Money quote:

Forgotten amongst all the sensationalism in the Iranian media accompanying the conference, was the bitter reality that the undermining or denial of human suffering for the sake of making political points – whatever they might be – will inevitably lead to moral degeneration: a moral degeneration that makes any judgment on the wrongfulness of the murder of the innocent dependent upon its political reverberations; a moral degeneration where by questioning the number of the victims, it fails to realize that "whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind".

Underneath the poisonous regime, there is hope in Persia.

21 Feb 2007 10:59 am

Bigots, Chauvinists, Semantic Slippage

A reader reprimands:

I may be wrong, but my understanding of 'bigotry' was an out-and-out hatred of a group of people. I don't sense this in Romney's quote. I sense ridiculousness, studipidity, and a certain amount of religious chauvinism, but not bigotry. I worry about semantic leak. Strong words should be reserved for the strong situations/people/sentiments to which they apply. Romney's opinion on this matter is silly and tiresome, but it is a far cry from bigotry.

My online dictionary defines "bigotry" as "intolerance toward those who hold different opinions than oneself." "Chauvinism" is defined as "excessive or prejudiced loyalty for one's own group, cause or gender." Maybe bigotry is what the victim of chauvinism thinks of the chauvinist. Or maybe we need a word that can somehow bridge the gap between the two. But, on reflection, I think the reader is closer to the truth than my first stab: Romney is attempting vicarious chauvinism on the part of a religion, evangelical Christianity, he doesn't share. I'm not sure we have a word in English for that, except shameless.

21 Feb 2007 10:17 am

Quote for the Day

It's a scoop from ABC News' Jon Karl:

Karl: You probably heard John McCain again come out and say that your friend Donald Rumsfeld is perhaps the worst Secretary of Defense ever.  What do you make of that?

Cheney: I just fundamentally disagree with John. John said some nasty things about me the other day, and then next time he saw me, ran over to me and apologized. Maybe he'll apologize to Rumsfeld.

Karl: So what's your take on where Secretary Rumsfeld fits in?

Cheney: I think Don's a great secretary. I know a little bit about the job. I've watched what he's done over there for six years. I think he did a superb job in terms of managing the Pentagon under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. He and John McCain had a number of dust-ups over policy, didn't have anything to do with Iraq -- other issues that were involved. John's entitled to his opinion. I just think he's wrong.

Karl: I know we're just about out of time, but I wanted to clarify: Senator McCain had said that the problem with President Bush is he listened to you too much. So this is what he was apologizing to you for?

Cheney: Yes, yes.

Karl: What did he say?

Cheney: Well, he came up to me on the floor a couple of days later, the next time I was on the floor of the Senate, said he'd been quoted out of context, and then basically offered an apology which I was happy to accept.

Is the good senator going to take that lying down? And what were these "other issues"? Torture, maybe - a subject John McCain who, unlike Cheney, served in combat and was tortured, knows something about.

21 Feb 2007 10:15 am

Steyn, Reynolds, Genocide

I'm sorry but I missed Mark Steyn's response to Mark Kleiman's concern that Steyn may be endorsing genocide of European Muslims thus:

My book isn't about what I want to happen but what I think will happen.

Steyn says I accused him of supporting genocide. I plainly didn't. In fact, I said that he "clearly rejects it." I merely noted his cool indifference to the possibility. Elsewhere, Steyn has considered the chance of an anti-Muslim final solution and writes:

Even if you're hot for a new Holocaust, demography tells. There are no Hitlers to hand.

Am I wrong to detect a certain tone of regret in this? Again, this isn't an endorsement of genocide. It's an argument that it's not feasible in Europe - no new Hitlers, dammit - and would destroy the character of America to become genocidal. Glenn Reynolds is in the same camp. He has predicted genocide, but doesn't actually endorse it. In this post, he lays his view out with clarity:

Civilized societies have always won against barbarians ever since the industrial revolution made making things a greater source of power than breaking them.

Civilized societies have found it harder, though, to beat the barbarians without killing all, or nearly all, of them. Were it really to become all-out war of the sort that Osama and his ilk want, the likely result would be genocide — unavoidable, and provoked, perhaps, but genocide nonetheless, akin to what Rome did to Carthage, or to what Americans did to American Indians. That's what happens when two societies can't live together, and the weaker one won't stop fighting — especially when the weaker one targets the civilians and children of the stronger. This is why I think it's important to pursue a vigorous military strategy now. Because if we don't, the military strategy we'll have to follow in five or ten years will be light-years beyond "vigorous."

Again, Reynolds isn't urging genocide. He's predicting it. With a little relish for flavor, wouldn't you say?

I should add, I guess, that I don't mean to get into a fight with my new Atlantic colleague, Mr Steyn. He is one of the funniest, sharpest writers in America today. Up there in humorous writing, in my book, with Kinsley, Hitchens, Barry, Chait. I share his disgust at Islamist fundamentalism and admire his willingness to tackle it head on. His wildly successful book, alas, is an intellectually vulgar diatribe based on the crudest demographic reductionism (and many very good jokes at the expense of the idiot left). I think the right is currently divided between those who hate the American left more than the Islamist right and those who take the opposite view. I'm afraid my dislike of anyone to the left of Joe Lieberman is not as intense as my dislike of religious terrorism. Which is why it's getting lonely out here.

P.S. On this whole meme, Matt Yglesias has a good post.

21 Feb 2007 08:33 am

A Humanist Jesus, Ctd

A reader eloquently described his own faith in a humanist Jesus here. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for whose magazine I now work, wrote something similar. Money quote:

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 'I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.'

But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, 'This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.' The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

A challenging thought for Ash Wednesday.