Dennett: The Evolution of Reasons

I'm Not Holy

A running thread Andrew Sullivan has on the phenomenon of glories reminded me to share this truly awesome shot I managed to catch of myself inside of one.

Beinart, Keller

An Evening with Bill Keller from The Graduate Center, CUNY

Storming the Citadel

From KulturFilms.

That Fraud, Julian Assange, Ctd

AFP Photo / Geoff Caddick

The indispensable Nick Cohen keeps a focus on the hypocrisies with which the megalomaniac continually soils himself and all who unthinkingly embrace him:

Assange allowed Israel Shamir, a genuinely sinister Holocaust denier, to take unredacted US State Department cables to Belarus. These were pure gold for Lukashenko’s KGB because they contained the names of opposition figures who had spoken to American officials. 

Shamir boasted in the far-left US magazine Counterpunch that Wikileaks had ‘revealed how… undeclared cash flows from the US coffers to the Belarus “opposition”.’ (His scare quotes.)

Lukashenko’s goons could not have been more appreciative. Shamir arrived in Belarus shortly after street protests against the dictator’s theft of the rigged 2010 general election. The KGB beat, arrested and imprisoned hundreds of demonstrators. The Belarusian state media said that Shamir had allowed the KGB to ‘show the background of what happened, to name the organizers, instigators and rioters, including foreign ones, without compromise, as well as to disclose the financing scheme of the destructive organizations’.

Among the figures the state press said Wikileaks had ‘exposed’ as America’s collaborators were Andrei Sannikov, widely regarded as the true winner of the election; Oleg Bebenin, Sannikov’s press secretary, who died in suspicious circumstances, as Lukashenko’s opponents are wont to do; and Vladimir Neklyayev, a writer and former president of Belarus PEN, who is now under house arrest.

Shamir’s anti-Semitic conspiracy theories clearly did not bother Assange — in a furious phone call to the editor of Private Eye Assange claimed that Jewish journalists in Britain, several of whom weren’t Jews at all, were conspiring against him. He has also proved himself a loyal friend to post-communist autocrats — as he showed when he took a job on Russia Today — Putin’s English-language propaganda station.

Meanwhile Wikileaks’ grassing up of the Belarusian opposition is hardly a secret, although Assange tried to cover it up. When reporters and rebellious staff inside Wikileaks protested, Assange tried to pretend that Shamir had never worked for him. Privately Assange told Shamir that he could avoid embarrassment by working under an assumed name. When the BBC’s Panorama revealed Assange’s double-dealing, his lawyers accused the BBC of using stolen documents to expose their client — a priceless accusation for the apostle of openness to level after he had received 250,000 stolen US cables.

Is Britain a Christian Country?

Kahlo, Rivera, Color

A Universe from Nothing, Ctd

QFTD

“I view my actions as part of a process toward freedom. I was demanding my right to practice the most basic human rights—freedom of expression and thought—so nothing was done in vain,” he says. “I believe I’m just a scapegoat for a larger conflict. There are a lot of people like me in Saudi Arabia who are fighting for their rights.” — Hamza Kashgari, having fled Saudi Arabia to escape the death-sentence awaiting him after a few relatively vanilla tweets referencing Mohammed.

Read the whole disgrace here.

Biovisions

Rushdie Threatened by Thugs, 21st Century Redux

That Fraud, Julian Assange

Image by espenmoe

 Jeff Bercovici in Forbes:

How foolish of me it was to question whether Wikileaks founder Julian Assange really had a deal to distribute his new talk show to hundreds of millions of viewers. It turns out he does: with Russia Today, the English-language news network launched by the Russian government to massage its international image.

That’s right: Assange, self-styled foe of government secrets and conspiracies of the powerful, is going to be a star on a TV network backed by the Kremlin. The same Kremlin that has done suspiciously little to investigate or prevent the killings and beatings of journalists that have plagued Russia for more than a decade. The same Kremlin accused of blatant fraud in December’s parliamentary elections. The same Kremlin whose control of the country’s broadcast media allowed it to suppress coverage of the massive protests mounted in response to that fraud. The same Kremlin whose embrace of corruption led to Russia being named “the world’s most corrupt major economy” by Transparency International in 2011.

Why am I completely unsurprised? Well, there's this, this, this, this, and this, for a start.

Kahneman: Thinking Fast and Slow

Who's Bowing to Foreign Leaders?

      Ever louder and more mainstream is the alarm over one of America's great parties becoming prostrate before Netanyahu.

Image: AP Photos

      Republicans love few lines more than their mockery of an American president "bowing to a Saudi king," a mistake that, granted, was likely made in some misguided deference to supposed royal protocol but was nevertheless close to meaningless. Now consider into what the GOP's own position on the Middle-East has mutated: complete deference in U.S. policy to the head of a foreign, right-wing coalition governing a small nation in the Middle East - a country which has historically been a strong ally, but one whose current leader has taken every opportunity to undermine and embarrass the President of the United States.
      Disagreement over foreign policy, it was once said, stopped at our borders. Not anymore.
      The RNC unanimously adopted a resolution seemingly aborting support for their own president's conception of a two-state solution.
      David Bromwich, in a long-form piece at the New York Review of Books, examines the candidates' positions regarding same:

...the most belligerent Republican on Israel and Iran has turned out to be Santorum: he asserted, in a recorded conversation with a voter on November 21, that “all the people that live in the West Bank are Israelis, they’re not Palestinians. There is no ‘Palestinian.’” A few days earlier, Santorum had said about the threat of Iran: “A country that is developing a weapon of mass destruction to use it to destroy another country must be stopped in a preemptive strike.” And on Meet the Press on January 1 he affirmed his view in different words: Iranian leaders must open their facilities to inspection and begin to dismantle their advanced equipment, or the US will attack. 

This statement comes at a moment of enormous tension—heightened by Israel’s warmest supporters in Congress. The Iran Threat Reductions Act, proposed by the Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, passed in the House of Representatives on December 14 by a vote of 410–11. This crudely assertive and possibly unconstitutional bill would prohibit all contact between Iranian and American officials without fifteen days’ prior notice to Congress. Bill Clinton, in 1996, complained of the “scandalous electioneering” practiced by Benjamin Netanyahu from abroad. 

Fifteen years later, ever since his visit to Congress in May, Benjamin Netanyahu has been working to intimidate the president and pull from Republican candidates and from Congress at large professions of loyalty to his project of bombing Iran to reduce its possible nuclear capability. 

There has been a change, however, since 1996. Clinton’s anger was registered in private. But it was Thomas Friedman, the American opinion-maker most highly regarded in Israel, who wrote in a column of December 13 that Netanyahu’s standing ovation in Congress last May “was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” And five days later, there occurred a remarkable exchange on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN programGlobal Public Square. The subject was how the Republicans try to outbid each other in submissive postures of unconditional loyalty to Israel; the immediate pretext was Gingrich’s having said on December 9 to an interviewer for the Jewish Channel (a cable station) that the Palestinians are an “invented” people. Zakaria and his guests then passed on to the broader subject of avowals of love for Israel and unquestioning support for Likud policies: 

 Zakaria: Michele Bachmann trumps them all by saying, “I went to a kibbutz when I was 18 years old.”

David Remnick: A socialist experiment, I might remind her. A socialist experiment. You know, as a Jewish American I find it disgusting. And I know what he’s going after. He’s going after—he’s going after a small slice of Jewish Americans who donate to political funds—to campaigns and also to Christian Evangelicals. It’s—the signaling is obvious. What they’re doing is obvious. But what they’re describing in terms of the, say, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has no bearing on reality whatsoever. It’s ignorance combined with cynical politics and irrelevance. It’s really awful. It’s really awful.

Zakaria: Do you agree? 

Peggy Noonan: Yes, I do.

Zakaria: Gillian?

Gillian Tett [of the Financial Times]: I do. And I think that actually given the current moves in Iran at the moment and what’s happening elsewhere in the region, that kind of rhetoric is likely to become more and more relevant going forward.

Zakaria: And then the other place where I noticed that there is some traction is Iran. There’s this feeling, again, I think somewhat unrealistically that we’re going to be tougher on Iran. We’re going to be, so that Gingrich says he wouldn’t bomb Iran, but he would effect regime change. Good luck, you know?

This was a breakthrough. Remnick’s comment is especially notable because it gives up the euphemism “Jewish voters” and refers frankly to Jewish donors. It is millions of dollars and not just a few thousand votes that the pandering Republicans are trawling for. Meanwhile, Israel itself has witnessed a development germane to the Republican pledges in Iowa of implicit support for any action by Israel. The majority of Israel’s intelligence establishment has actively argued against or publicly spoken to oppose the adventurist policy of Netanyahu and his description of Iran as an “existential threat.” These last words have been discountenanced by the present director of Mossad, Tamir Pardo, and, more sternly, by the retired director Meir Dagan, as well as by the former head of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate, Amos Yadlin, the former chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, Gabi Ashkenazi, and the former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin. Opposition within Israel apparently succeeded in thwarting an initiative by Netanyahu to attack Iran in 2010. It remains to be seen whether it can do so again. 

Probably none of the Republicans who clocked in at the Iowa debates to back aggressive US support of Israel against Iran was aware of this internal division—easily discoverable in recent stories in Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post. Such an uprising from the military and intelligence establishment itself, against an intended military action by an elected government, is exceedingly rare in the history of democracies. So we are at a strange crossroads. The right-wing coalition government of Israel is trying to secure support, with the help of an American party in an election year, for an act of war that it could not hope to accomplish unassisted; while an American opposition party complies with the demand of support by a foreign power, in an election year, to gain financial backing and popular leverage that it could not acquire unassisted.

A Universe from Nothing

30 Writers on God

Hold Everything

Image by Surat Lozowick

Cela, Vous Ne Pouvez Pas Dire.

French parliamentarians need to get a fucking grip and stop proposing bans on ideas that they find ugly. Agreed: burkas are contemptible. Armenian Genocide denialism? Also contemptible. But a fine for demonstrating one's own historical ignorance? Ridiculous.

Mustafa Ozer/AFP/Getty Images

By banning unsavory expression and speech, the French habitually put themselves in the terrible company of the censorious rightward thugs they fail to oppose. It's short-cut cowardice. From The Guardian:

Turkey has threatened to denounce France's colonial past at international meetings in retaliation for French plans to prosecute people who deny that the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks was genocide. 

Turkey rejects the term genocide to describe the killings of Armenians more than 90 years ago. Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed and experts say it was the first genocide of the 20th century. 

France considers the killings a genocide. The lower house of the French parliament is to debate a proposal that would punish anyone denying that the slaughter was genocide with one year in prison and a €45,000 (£37,700) fine.

Why do Erdogan's work for him?

The Immortal Rejoinders of Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

I cared more about you than anyone I've never loved in person, and I'll miss you.

_00_

I'm Running for President, and I'll Do Whatever You Say.

Friedman on the prostrations of an American party unconditionally beholden to a government of seven million:

I have a simple motto when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I love both Israelis and Palestinians, but God save me from some of their American friends — those who want to love them to death, literally.

That thought came to mind last week when Newt Gingrich took the Republican competition to grovel for Jewish votes — by outloving Israel — to a new low by suggesting that the Palestinians are an “invented” people and not a real nation entitled to a state.

This was supposed to show that Newt loves Israel more than Mitt Romney, who only told the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom that he would move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem because “I don’t seek to take actions independent of what our allies think is best, and if Israel’s leaders thought that a move of that nature would be helpful to their efforts, then that’s something I’ll be inclined to do. ... I don’t think America should play the role of the leader of the peace process. Instead, we should stand by our ally.”

That’s right. America’s role is to just applaud whatever Israel does, serve as its A.T.M. and shut up. We have no interests of our own. And this guy’s running for president?

As for Newt, well, let’s see: If the 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians are not a real people entitled to their own state, that must mean Israel is entitled to permanently occupy the West Bank and that must mean — as far as Newt is concerned — that Israel’s choices are: 1) to permanently deprive the West Bank Palestinians of Israeli citizenship and put Israel on the road to apartheid; 2) to evict the West Bank Palestinians through ethnic cleansing and put Israel on the road to the International Criminal Court in the Hague; or 3) to treat the Palestinians in the West Bank as citizens, just like Israeli Arabs, and lay the foundation for Israel to become a binational state. And this is called being “pro-Israel”?

The Stars in Your Teeth

Up Against a Wall

Jan-Paul Pelissier / ASSOCIATED PRESS

from the Washington Post:

The veto by British Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative euro-skeptic who cherishes the pound and looks askance at heavy-handed European regulations in British affairs, underscored his nation’s long unease with relinquishing national powers to the E.U. and left London isolated in a region now moving toward deeper integration without it. His move left Britain’s Guardian newspaper asking, “Will it be Splendid Isolation, or Miserable?”

At the same time, Cameron made life harder for a region desperately trying to unite behind a plan to quell a debt crisis that is threatening the global economy. Without Britain on board, the 26 other E.U. nations now face potentially complicated legal obstacles to meet one of the prime objectives of a new treaty: Giving fresh powers to E.U. institutions to slap automatic penalties on governments that recklessly spend and borrow.

Merkozy may be ticked-off, but I didn't really see a path for Cameron to have done anything but veto a proposal that relinquishes sovereignty to Brussels (read: Berlin) against the will of the majority of his citizens, in order to save a currency in which the U.K doesn't participate. Questions concerning sovereignty and greater integration are typically ones that should be decided democratically, no?

How to tell just how little at ease Merkel is feeling right now? Well, I haven't seen her do this in a while: