The Rational Ape

Rushdie Threatened by Thugs, 21st Century Redux

2012-01-25T18:55:00.000-08:00

That Fraud, Julian Assange

2012-01-25T12:07:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-24T10:32:00.000-08:00

Who's Bowing to Foreign Leaders?

2012-01-23T13:30:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-19T18:20:00.000-08:00

30 Writers on God

2012-01-18T21:02:00.000-08:00

Hold Everything

2011-12-31T21:32:00.000-08:00

Image by Surat Lozowick

Cela, Vous Ne Pouvez Pas Dire.

2011-12-19T12:31:00.000-08:00

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?

2011-12-18T01:25:00.000-08:00

The Immortal Rejoinders of Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-15T23:10:00.000-08:00

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

2011-12-15T21:35:00.000-08:00

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

_00_

2011-12-14T14:27:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-14T14:24:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-09T12:31:00.000-08:00

Up Against a Wall

2011-12-09T12:29:00.000-08:00

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:

Rushdie and Manji @ 92 Street Y

2011-11-22T13:43:00.000-08:00

Martin Amis

2011-11-22T13:41:00.000-08:00

in The New Yorker:

When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less. The vast presence of Joyce relies pretty well entirely on “Ulysses,” with a little help from “Dubliners.” You could jettison Kafka’s three attempts at full-length fiction (unfinished by him, and unfinished by us) without muffling the impact of his seismic originality. George Eliot gave us one readable book, which turned out to be the central Anglophone novel. Every page of Dickens contains a paragraph to warm to and a paragraph to veer back from. Coleridge wrote a total of two major poems (and collaborated on a third). Milton consists of “Paradise Lost.” Even my favorite writer, William Shakespeare, who usually eludes all mortal limitations, succumbs to this law. Run your eye down the contents page and feel the slackness of your urge to reread the comedies (“As You Like It” is not as we like it); and who would voluntarily curl up with “King John” or “Henry VI, Part III”?

Proustians will claim that “In Search of Lost Time” is unimprovable throughout, despite all the agonizing longueurs. And Janeites will never admit that three of the six novels are comparative weaklings (I mean “Sense and Sensibility,” “Mansfield Park,” and “Persuasion”). Perhaps the only true exceptions to the fifty-fifty model are Homer and Harper Lee. Our subject, here, is literary evaluation, so of course everything I say is mere opinion, unverifiable and also unfalsifiable, which makes the ground shakier still. But I stubbornly suspect that only the cultist, or the academic, is capable of swallowing an author whole. Writers are peculiar, readers are particular: it is just the way we are. One helplessly reaches for Kant’s dictum about the crooked timber of humanity, or for John Updike’s suggestion to the effect that we are all of us “mixed blessings.” Unlike the heroes and heroines of “Northanger Abbey,” “Pride and Prejudice,” and “Emma,” readers and writers are not expressly designed to be perfect for each other...

Novelists can be likened to omnicompetent tour guides—as they gloss and vivify the wonders of unfamiliar terrains, the marketplaces, the museums, the tearooms and wine cellars, the gardens, the houses of worship. Then, without warning, the suave cicerone becomes a garrulous rogue cabdriver, bearing you off on a series of sinister detours (out by the airport, and in the dead of night). The great writers can take us anywhere; but half the time they’re taking us where we don’t want to go.

E.C. GTFO

2011-11-12T12:30:00.000-08:00

Libya and the Left

2011-11-05T13:37:00.000-07:00

The left can be a lonely place for those of us who do not immediately hiss at the mention of deploying military force abroad. Libya was a case in point. Michael Berube brilliantly culls most of the hysterical criticisms hurled in the weeks leading up to the intervention, and in doing so reveals the few legitimate criticisms that could have been leveled as having gone largely unmade by an habituated left. Article here. To close with the challenge:

Ten years ago, surveying the post-9/11 landscape in the pages of Dissent, Michael Walzer famously asked if there could be a “decent left” in a superpower. It was the wrong question—or perhaps just the wrong term—and it has since been mocked with a mighty mockery: after all, for the hard left, who take as much pride in hardness and firmness as did any of George Bush’s most ardent admirers, “decency” is a prissy value, to be gauged and monitored by a Decency League made up of schoolmarms and busybodies. The question, rather, should have been whether there can be a rigorously internationalist left in the U.S., a left that will promote and support the freedom of speech, the freedom to worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear—even on those rare and valuable occasions when doing so puts one in the position of supporting U.S. policies. That, I think, is the question that confronts the American left after Benghazi, in the years following the Arab Spring.

Just wait for it...

2011-10-28T13:40:00.000-07:00

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(via TRG Vision at stellar.io)

Self-Explanatory Clip is Self-Explanatory.

2011-10-20T14:28:00.000-07:00

QFTD

2011-10-17T09:25:00.000-07:00

"It seems that we can add, to sausages and laws, churches as a phenomenon that is not pleasant to watch at the manufacturing stage." - C. Hitchens on the founding of the Church of Latter Day Saints.

The Sectarian Fall

2011-10-11T14:19:00.000-07:00

After hesitation, Hussein Ibish worries publicly:

Across the Arab world, terrifying sectarian dynamics are starting to emerge, essentially pitting Arab Sunnis versus all religious minorities. The elements of this have been obvious for quite a while, but the pattern has become so pronounced and almost pervasive that it demands to be recognized no matter how frightening the prospects.

Throughout the region, political forces are lining up time and again along this extremely dangerous binary divide. For instance, the ecumenism of the Egyptian revolution has given way to the most gruesome sectarian violence between the military and Islamist mobs on the one hand and Coptic protesters on the other hand. This was particularly evident over the weekend, with deadly clashes and sectarian incitement raging throughout Cairo.

The Syrian regime has done its best to cast the uprising in that country in a sectarian light, with a disturbing degree of success. Regional support for Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite-minority rule is now almost entirely restricted to non-Sunni Arabs (as well as Iran), including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Shia-led Iraqi government, Shia parliamentarians and activists in Kuwait and other Gulf States, and a significant number of Christians in Lebanon and Syria.

By contrast, Assad’s alliance with Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has collapsed largely along sectarian lines. Support for Assad among Arab Sunnis has dropped to virtually zero, including all Sunni-dominated governments. Support for his rule has also further exacerbated the already deeply-damaged reputation of Hezbollah among Arab Sunnis.

The Sunni Arab world, meanwhile, has been largely silent about the campaign of relentless persecution and repression against the Shia majority in Bahrain, implicitly backing the oppressive rule of the Sunni-minority royal family.

Sectarian tensions simmer in Kuwait but are held at bay by the country’s wealth and small population. In Saudi Arabia, however, they have been bubbling away for months, particularly in the country’s oil-rich eastern provinces. Last week they boiled over in Al-Awamiyah, as Shia rioters were fired on by security forces. Saudi spokespersons dismissed the incident as “nonsectarian” and merely criminal in nature, but immediately undermined their arguments by blaming Iran for the unrest...

The emerging sectarian narrative threatens to rip apart many Arab societies, and indeed the Arab world in general. More than military dictatorships or violent organizations that may seek to exploit these tensions, the illusions that Sunni Arabs across the region are seeking to impose a new and repressive order on non-Sunni Arabs, or that non-Sunni Arabs are subversive elements or disloyal agents of Iran or other foreign powers, pose the gravest threat to a better future in the Middle East.

2011-10-05T15:07:00.000-07:00

Let's occasionally remind ourselves why and over whom we may justifiably assert some relative moral authority.

A Billion-Dollar View

2011-09-28T17:27:00.000-07:00

And then there's this poison:

2011-09-26T14:21:00.000-07:00

@6:00, Pentecostal minister Becky Fischer, of Jesus Camp fame, into the minds of children puts: "Can I tell you a secret?... I know some kids that have prayed for their dead animals and they came back to life again."

"I’m not saying Hipsters are Terrorists..."

2011-09-26T13:52:00.000-07:00

from @MeganAmram's 9/11 memorial essay.

Mind-Reading, Approximately

2011-09-25T09:23:00.000-07:00

From Medicalxpress:

While volunteers watched movie clips, a scanner watched their brains. And from their brain activity, a computer made rough reconstructions of what they viewed. Scientists reported that result Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011 and speculated such an approach might be able to reveal dreams and hallucinations someday. In the future, it might help stroke victims or others who have no other way to communicate, said Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the paper. (University of California, Berkeley, Shinji Nishimoto)

Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one's own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach.

QFTD

2011-09-21T11:13:00.000-07:00

"I’m not shocked by much any more, but I am shocked by this: the leaders of one of the great parties in Congress calling on the Federal Reserve to tighten money in the throes of the most prolonged downturn since the Great Depression." - David Frum

Animating Matter

2011-09-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

"The past and the future are equally real."

2011-09-16T11:43:00.000-07:00

Three of the ten things you should know about time, from Sean Carroll.

2. The past and future are equally real. This isn’t completely accepted, but it should be. Intuitively we think that the “now” is real, while the past is fixed and in the books, and the future hasn’t yet occurred. But physics teaches us something remarkable: every event in the past and future is implicit in the current moment. This is hard to see in our everyday lives, since we’re nowhere close to knowing everything about the universe at any moment, nor will we ever be — but the equations don’t lie. As Einstein put it, “It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.”

4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious — clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds. (Via conference participant David Eagleman.)

10. A lifespan is a billion heartbeats. Complex organisms die. Sad though it is in individual cases, it’s a necessary part of the bigger picture; life pushes out the old to make way for the new. Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats — about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise. In that very real sense, all animal species experience “the same amount of time.” At least, until we master #9 and become immortal. (Amazing talk by Geoffrey West.)

Grinding his teeth,

2011-09-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

the Fareed way:

If Rick Perry does emerge as the front-runner, it is not just the story of one guy doing well; it is the story of a very different Republican Party than the one we have been familiar with for the last 30 or 40 years.

It would result in a Republican Party with greater energy, enthusiasm and street cred, but also one that is more extreme, uncompromising and much less concerned with being dismissed by the mainstream media or characterized as irresponsible by people like me. It will make for a more difficult political system because these are the forces that have been very reluctant to compromise. We may find that the debt showdown was just the beginning.

2011-09-16T08:52:00.000-07:00

via clusterflock

yes.

2011-09-14T00:54:00.000-07:00

2011-09-13T12:42:00.001-07:00

"Hospital corners on your sheets is a plus. Fetishizing Judith Butler is a minus. Keffiyeh as a scarf is a deal breaker."

2011-09-03T13:22:00.000-07:00

From the npluspersonals tumblr.

The latest in confirming the obvious...

2011-09-03T10:47:00.000-07:00

Further evidence that the megalomaniac only cares to "protect sources" when they are his own. To hell or worse with the rest.

A Fallacy of Discounted Ideas

2011-09-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

This, from Paul Berman, is indispensable.

Bloom: Essentialism Rules Pleasure and Value

2011-08-25T22:52:00.000-07:00

The Ravages of Chinese "Medicine"

2011-08-25T12:16:00.000-07:00

Image Credit: Rodger Bosch / AFP - Getty Images

I have been to Aquila and met these individual rhinos. Two of the three mutilated were so hacked-up that they didn't survive. And this was done for a substance the ingestion of which has the curative value of biting your fingernails.

From AFP and Photoblog:

Poachers attacked three of the six rhino on the Aquila Game Reserve, killing one outright and injuring this one badly. This rhino bull was tranquilised by poachers, who then sawed off his primary horn, and began cutting the smaller one, but were apparently disturbed and left. The critically injured male is one of the latest victims in South Africa's rhino bloodbath, which is surging on privately owned reserves as criminal syndicates target easier prey for the Asian black market.

Rhino horn is used in traditional Asian medicine to cure a range of ailments from fever to cancer, and sells for more than cocaine despite having no scientific medicinal value.

And from Aquila:

After finding the second rhino, we sent all rangers and security staff in game vehicles, on quad bikes and horseback to search for the one rhino that had not been accounted for. Knowing that the poachers had used drugs that would kill the rhino instead of bullets that could be heard by anti poaching teams, time was of the essence and no expense was spared… two helicopters and a light aircraft from Cape Town were brought in to search Aquila’s 7500 hectare conservancy. The rhino was spotted from the air by the owner Searl Derman, from his friend, Enzo Kuun’s helicopter of Cape Town Helicopters. On landing they discovered a blood bath and a rhino with his face literally hatched off with pangas and machetes proving that there were two active teams attacking the Aquila rhinos, one using a chain saw, the other using pangas and machetes to dehorn the rhino.

Dying without ever having experienced great music...

2011-08-25T08:47:00.000-07:00

Amidst the entertaining spanking of Gov. Rick Perry, Richard Dawkins describes the power of the universal acid:

What any theory of life needs to explain is functional complexity. Complexity can be measured as statistical improbability, and living things are statistically improbable in a very particular direction: the direction of functional efficiency. The body of a bird is not just a prodigiously complicated machine, with its trillions of cells - each one in itself a marvel of miniaturized complexity - all conspiring together to make muscle or bone, kidney or brain. Its interlocking parts also conspire to make it good for something - in the case of most birds, good for flying. An aero-engineer is struck dumb with admiration for the bird as flying machine: its feathered flight-surfaces and ailerons sensitively adjusted in real time by the on-board computer which is the brain; the breast muscles, which are the engines, the ligaments, tendons and lightweight bony struts all exactly suited to the task. And the whole machine is immensely improbable in the sense that, if you randomly shook up the parts over and over again, never in a million years would they fall into the right shape to fly like a swallow, soar like a vulture, or ride the oceanic up-draughts like a wandering albatross. Any theory of life has to explain how the laws of physics can give rise to a complex flying machine like a bird or a bat or a pterosaur, a complex swimming machine like a tarpon or a dolphin, a complex burrowing machine like a mole, a complex climbing machine like a monkey, or a complex thinking machine like a person.
Darwin explained all of this with one brilliantly simple idea - natural selection, driving gradual evolution over immensities of geological time. His is a good theory because of the huge ratio of what it explains (all the complexity of life) divided by what it needs to assume (simply the nonrandom survival of hereditary information through many generations). The rival theory to explain the functional complexity of life - creationism - is about as bad a theory as has ever been proposed. What it postulates (an intelligent designer) is even more complex, even more statistically improbable than what it explains. In fact it is such a bad theory it doesn’t deserve to be called a theory at all, and it certainly doesn’t deserve to be taught alongside evolution in science classes.
The simplicity of Darwin’s idea, then, is a virtue for three reasons. First, and most important, it is the signature of its immense power as a theory, when compared with the mass of disparate facts that it explains - everything about life including our own existence. Second, it makes it easy for children to understand (in addition to the obvious virtue of being true!), which means that it could be taught in the early years of school. And finally, it makes it extremely beautiful, one of the most beautiful ideas anyone ever had as well as arguably the most powerful. To die in ignorance of its elegance, and power to explain our own existence, is a tragic loss, comparable to dying without ever having experienced great music, great literature, or a beautiful sunset.

QFTD

2011-08-18T09:29:00.000-07:00

"But [Assange] also unsettles her, telling her without fear she can become a “megalomaniac” like him. She says in her book “I couldn’t have felt less comfortable alone in that room with him”, and most strikingly, reveals that he asked her to be his Mary Magdalene and 'bathe his feet at the cross'." - Dina Rickman, interviewing Heather Brooke for the Huffington Post.

Postmodernism is Dead?

2011-08-17T09:48:00.000-07:00

I wish. But, despite its title, the way this article is written suggests not. Still, there is some descriptive sense here:

Unlike, say, the Enlightenment or Romanticism, postmodernism (even as a word) summons up the movement it intends to overturn. In this way, postmodernism might be seen as the delayed germination of an older seed, planted by artists like Marcel Duchamp, during modernism’s high noon of the 1920s and 1930s. (Seen in this light, the start-date that the V&A offers for postmodernism—1970—is quite late.)

Thus, if modernists like Picasso and Cézanne focused on design, hierarchy, mastery, the one-off, then postmodernists, such as Andy Warhol and Willem de Kooning, were concerned with collage, chance, anarchy, repetition. If modernists such as Virginia Woolf relished depth and metaphysics, then postmodernists such as Martin Amis favoured surface and irony. As for composers, modernists like Béla Bartók were hieratic and formalist, and postmodernists, like John Adams, were playful and interested in deconstructing. In other words, modernism preferred connoisseurship, tended to be European and dealt in universals. Postmodernism preferred commodity and America, and embraced as many circumstances as the world contained.

In the beginning, postmodernism was not merely ironical, merely gesture, some kind of clever sham, a hotchpotch for the sake of it. It became these things later in lesser works by lesser artists: Michael Nyman, Takashi Murakami, Tracey Emin and Jonathan Safran Foer. Rather, in the beginning artists, philosophers, linguists, writers and musicians were bound up in a movement of great force that sought to break with the past, and which did so with great energy. A new and radical permissiveness was the result. Postmodernism was a high-energy revolt, an attack, a strategy for destruction. It was a set of critical and rhetorical practices that sought to destabilise the modernist touchstones of identity, historical progress and epistemic certainty.

Above all, it was a way of thinking and making that sought to strip privilege from any one ethos and to deny the consensus of taste. Like all the big ideas, it was an artistic tendency that grew to take on social and political significance. As Ihab Hassan, the Egyptian-American philosopher, has said, there moved through this (our) period “a vast will to un-making, affecting the body politic, the body cognitive, the erotic body, the individual psyche, the entire realm of discourse in the west.”

The pendulum swings. Enter the postmodern Tea-Party.

Robots and the Illusion of Free Will

2011-08-17T09:13:00.000-07:00

Judea Pearl, director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA, talks with Roger Bingham. Pearl is, incidentally, the father of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl.

Kidwar

2011-08-11T15:03:00.000-07:00

For Sunday

2011-08-07T17:03:00.000-07:00

God's blog.

"Is Bibi Anti-Israel?"

2011-08-02T15:07:00.000-07:00

Whatever happened to the "indefensibility" of the 1967 borders with mutually agreed swaps? Isn't this the first rational question to ask Netanyahu in response to this news? Adam Serwer wonders, too.

Censorship Tells the Wrong Story

2011-07-27T09:47:00.000-07:00

A fantastic campaign, more of which is cataloged at My Modern Met.

QFTD

2011-07-27T09:31:00.000-07:00

"America is the only country in the world that that has the luxury of creating an economic crisis when there isn’t one. Ours is the only democracy with a debt ceiling, with the exception of Denmark, which raises its ceiling well in advance of when it would be reached. Economists say that our “debt crisis” is an unforced error, because people are more than willing to lend us money, at pretty good rates. This is the benefit of having a really good credit score.

And yet there are some who wish to call the credit card company to voluntarily reduce our credit limit after they just maxed it out. This tells us that politics triumphs economics in this country. That we ended up with so much debt is a result of politics, anyway. For all the talk of budgetary restraint coming from Congress, the fact is it was Congress that authorized all the spending that has brought us to where we are. Yes, every single dime." - Elvin Lim

"In Heaven, all the interesting people are missing."

2011-07-26T15:49:00.000-07:00

(h/t 3QD)

Kiryas Joel: Trending Towards Theocracy in N.Y.

2011-07-18T13:52:00.000-07:00

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State on the existence of what is essentially a de facto mini-theocracy in the Empire State.

Kiryas Joel is an enclave of ultra-orthodox Jews who belong to the Satmar Hasidic sect. Members of this group believe in separating themselves from others – they’d rather not be around non-sect members. Thirty-four years ago, they won the right to create their own village from the surrounding community of Monroe.

The village’s founders might have envisioned an idyllic community where people of a shared faith lived in harmony. It hasn’t worked out that way. As often happens when people live in insular communities, factions emerge. Dissidents in Kiryas Joel don’t like the way the town of about 20,000 is being run. The dissidents, who by some accounts now make up 40 percent of the community, say religious discrimination is rampant. They say if you don’t belong to the right synagogue, you’re a second-class citizen.

A local newspaper, the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, N.Y., reported, “The case alleges discrimination against dissidents…in various facets of public life, from tax exemptions for synagogues to election improprieties to selective enforcement of village noise ordinances. Among the most serious allegations is that Kiryas Joel’s Public Safety Department, a quasi-police agency, has acted as enforcers for the main congregation and tolerated acts of violence and intimidation against dissidents by unruly crowds of young supporters of Satmar Grand Rebbe Aron Teitelbaum, the leader of Kiryas Joel’s majority faction.”

...visitors to Kiryas Joel might be forgiven for believing they have stepped into a mini-theocracy. A sign at the village entrance admonishes visitors to dress modestly. Cleavage-revealing tops for women are verboten, and both sexes are told to cover arms and legs. Couples are advised to “maintain gender separation in public places.”

The sign was erected by the town’s largest synagogue. Its wording is tough, but in fact the village can’t legally enforce rules like this. Still, women who dare to visit the community while wearing skimpy summer outfits have reported scowls and glares. (Imagine the reaction from the Religious Right if this were a town of fundamentalist Muslims and they erected a sign reading, “Women are welcome to visit if accompanied by a male relative. Please respect our values by wearing a burqa.”)

More.

For the Annals of Megalomania

2011-07-13T12:07:00.000-07:00

Watch Assange arrogate himself credit for the Egyptian revolution.

Drugs and the Meaning of Life

2011-07-11T09:18:00.000-07:00

Sam Harris separates psychedelics, and the right to them, from the non-discriminate modern category of "drugs."

The “war on drugs” has been well lost, and should never have been waged. While it isn’t explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution, I can think of no political right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time. (And the fact that we make room for them in our prisons by paroling murderers and rapists makes one wonder whether civilization isn’t simply doomed.)

I have a daughter who will one day take drugs. Of course, I will do everything in my power to see that she chooses her drugs wisely, but a life without drugs is neither foreseeable, nor, I think, desirable. Someday, I hope she enjoys a morning cup of tea or coffee as much as I do. If my daughter drinks alcohol as an adult, as she probably will, I will encourage her to do it safely. If she chooses to smoke marijuana, I will urge moderation.[2] Tobacco should be shunned, of course, and I will do everything within the bounds of decent parenting to steer her away from it. Needless to say, if I knew my daughter would eventually develop a fondness for methamphetamine or crack cocaine, I might never sleep again. But if she does not try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in her adult life, I will worry that she may have missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience...

I have visited both extremes on the psychedelic continuum. The positive experiences were more sublime than I could have ever imagined or than I can now faithfully recall. These chemicals disclose layers of beauty that art is powerless to capture and for which the beauty of Nature herself is a mere simulacrum. It is one thing to be awestruck by the sight of a giant redwood and to be amazed at the details of its history and underlying biology. It is quite another to spend an apparent eternity in egoless communion with it. Positive psychedelic experiences often reveal how wondrously at ease in the universe a human being can be—and for most of us, normal waking consciousness does not offer so much as a glimmer of these deeper possibilities.

Image Credit: Alex Grey

Cubeverse

2011-06-08T10:24:00.000-07:00

In Defense of Fucking

2011-06-07T16:58:00.000-07:00

Kathryn Schulz, in New York Magazine:

For as long as some people have fretted about expletives in literature, others have seen fit to laugh at them. Here is Cole Porter, mock-lamenting the profanity of writers back in 1934: “Good authors, too, who once knew better words / Now only use four-letter words writing prose / Anything goes!” That was sometime after James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, and sometime before Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, and Erica Jong. Yet the idea persists that the use of swear words by writers is fundamentally uncreative and indolent—that the lazy man’s “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is “Fuck this shit.”

This idea rests on the assumption that “bad” words really are bad—and ditto writers who use them without exceptional justification. In crime fiction, foul language is justified on the ground that it is lifelike. (Art just imitates that shit.) In Go the Fuck to Sleep, foul language is not simply justified but justification: The whole book is about the taboo status of the word fuck. By contrast, outside of books like Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word or Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, it’s difficult to justify profanity in serious nonfiction.

But do we need such a justification, beyond the one a writer might mount for any word—i.e., that it works? There is, after all, no such thing as an intrinsically bad, boring, or lazy word. There is only how it is deployed, and one of the pleasures of profanity is how diversely you can deploy it. In The Mother Tongue,Bill Bryson argues that okay is “the quintessential Americanism” and “the most grammatically versatile of words.” Okay. But surely it has a rival—or a compatriot—in fuck. Wherever it originated (the jury is out), the F-word has flourished in our adolescent American soil. And pace Bryson, its grammatical versatility cannot be topped: You can use it as noun, verb, adverb, adjective, or interjection, not to mention in any mood whatsoever, from exultation to rage.

I know of no better rebuttal to the “bad words are bad writing” equation than film critic Anthony Lane’s brutal 2005 takedown of Star Wars in The New Yorker. Listen to Yoda for a moment: “Mourn them do not. Miss them do not. The shadow of greed that is.” Now listen to Lane demolish—with awesome precision, as one demolishes a single building in a city block—that mangled syntax and ersatz wisdom: “Break me a fucking give.”

Bad? Boring? Please. Pulitzer him a fucking give. Writers don’t use expletives out of laziness or the puerile desire to shock or because we mislaid the thesaurus. We use them because, sometimes, the four-letter word is the better word—indeed, the best one. In The Debt to Pleasure, John Lanchester provides an astute breakdown of three words that, at first, might seem interchangeable. “Compare,” he writes, “the implication of mismanagement, of organization going wrong, in the Gallic debacle with the candidly chaotic, intimate quality of the Italian fiasco, or the blokishly masculine and pragmatic (and I would suggest implicitly reversible and therefore, in its deep assumptions, optimistic) American fuck-up.”

The rest. And,

(h/t lauralauralaura)

False Gods and Politics

2011-06-06T09:54:00.000-07:00

The above is an ad that will run against Rep. Paul Ryan in Wisconsin's 1st district. It's the lowest of the low. I won't defend Ryan's insincere budget, nor Rand's nutbag individualism, but unfortunately this piece implicitly smears Ryan and other conservatives for worshiping Ayn Rand the atheist, and the message is certainly not one alleging hypocrisy. It is almost impossible to imagine a political ad smearing its target by association with a writer of Christian or Jewish faith. Though different, this guilt by association with a hated minority is reminiscent of the bigoted insinuations of this ad, which I posted last year:

Goldfish

2011-06-03T09:46:00.001-07:00

Herstory

2011-06-03T09:43:00.000-07:00

"He who warned, uh, the… the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms, uh, by ringin’ those bells and um by makin’ sure that as he’s ridin’ his horse through town to send those warnin’ shots and bells that, uh, we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free… and we were gonna be armed.”

Sarah Palin's understanding of Paul Revere.

Regional Consequences of Syrian Unrest

2011-06-01T16:53:00.000-07:00

From The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:

As protest movements sweep through the Middle East, few countries exemplify the opportunities and potential pitfalls of political change as well as Syria. Beginning on March 15, Syrians took to the streets in large numbers, demanding a more responsive and democratic government. After an initial promise of reform, the government of President Bashar al-Assad has cracked down on protestors with increasingly brutal force. The continued unrest in Syria has serious implications for Iran’s role in the region, the Israeli-Arab conflict, the stability of Lebanon, and organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

Carnegie and the Brookings Institution co-hosted a panel of experts to discuss the prospects for democratic change in Syria and the implications for the region. Speakers included Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Tamara Wittes, National Defense University Professor Murhaf Jouejati, Syrian human rights activist Ammar Abdulhamid, former Israeli ambassador Itamar Rabinovich, and Paul Salem of the Carnegie Middle East Center. Carnegie’s Marwan Muasher moderated.

As Syrians face al-Khatibian style brutality, Moisés Naím explains why undertaking intervention to facilitate overthrow in Syria is vastly more complex than doing the same in Libya, though moral justifications obviously exist for both. Unfortunately, Assad seems to be somewhat protected, at least from international force, by circumstance. Also from CEIP:

First: Syria's military is far stronger than Libya's. Syria has one of the largest, best equipped, and trained armed forces in the Middle East. It also has chemical and biological weapons and its paramilitary forces are among the largest in the world. In contrast, Gaddafi kept the Libyan military fragmented, ill equipped, and poorly trained.

Second: War fatigue. Libya exhausted the little appetite left in the United States to engage in wars that are not justified by clear threats to its vital interests. Syrian dissidents are suffering the consequences of the long and costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the recent raid on Libya. U.S. military support for remote causes will henceforth be more limited and selective. And, as far as wars are concerned, Europe won't act without Washington. This leaves the heroic Syrian dissidents all on their own.

Third: Thorny neighbors. Libya has Egypt on one side and Tunisa on the other--the jewels of the Arab Spring. Syria borders with one of the world's most volatile mixture of countries: Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Jordan, and Turkey.

Fourth: No allies. Gaddafi has no friends and even his own children wanted to marginalize him. In an unprecedented move, the Arab League supported the establishment of a strictly enforced no-fly zone in Libya. In contrast, Bashar al-Assad has powerful allies inside and outside the region--starting with Iran (and, therefore, Hezbollah and Hamas). It is not even clear if Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government would welcome a chaotic transition of power in Syria. Even Vogue magazine was smitten with this family and wrote a sycophantic article about Asma Assad, "the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies" endowed with "dark-brown eyes, wavy chin-length brown hair, long neck, an energetic grace." It's hard to bomb someone like that.

Fifth: Who to Support? Recently, two senior White House officials told the New York Times that the government's weak response to the events in Syria is in part due to the lack of interlocutors among the opposition. They just don't know who to contact. And another senior U.S. official--who requested anonymity--told me that in his estimate the chaos and carnage following the demise of the Assad regime would be far worse than what it has been so far in any of the other Arab countries undergoing a political transition.

(h/t Josh Lockman)

Metaphor Gone Mad

2011-05-28T11:08:00.000-07:00

(h/t A. Sullivan) Rama thinks that synesthesia results from the neurological wiring for metaphor in overdrive/overconnectivity. About this fascinating prospect, here's a talk:

Parts 2 and 3. And here's a lecture.

Blow the Mind (Up)

2011-05-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

Figure 1: (left) termite castle; (right) Gaudi's La Sagrada Famiglia.

This is one of the coolest examples of cognition-free-competency in contrast with top-down (cognitively directed) competency around. The two vastly different modes of execution can sometimes come to stunning convergence. The salient difference between these two structures lies in the representational ability of their creators: the structure on the right had a conscious purpose for being built, and was dependent on verbal communication, while the structure on the left was built by clueless organisms with no organizational plan. That "mind" is not requisite for the construction of highly functional complexity is both hard and wonderful to comprehend. Dennett:

Only in one species, Homo sapiens, has transmission by replication of nongenetic information taken off. In us, culture accumulates recursively, explosively, leaping thousands of miles and dozens of centuries in single steps. This hyperpotent variety of cultural evolution depends, I will argue, on language and more specifically on features of words, a category of cultural replicant found only in human beings (and, marginally, degenerately, in some of their domesticated animals and pets, such as parrots). It is words, I will argue, that make possible a novel system of design control never before instantiated on the planet, the difference dramatized by the comparison between the termite castle and Antonio Gaudí’s La Sagrada Famiglia church in Barcelona (Fig. 1). These two animal artifacts, so outwardly similar in shape, are produced by fundamentally different processes. In the case of the termite castle, “local rules generate global order,” as the slogan has it: Individual termites follow rigid rules for moving and depositing building material by detecting local pheromone signals, and no organism has, or needs, a vision or blueprint of the whole structure. In the case of La Sagrada Famiglia, there was an “intelligent designer,” an individual, Antonio Gaudí, who did have a guiding vision and did draw up plans; the control of the building flowed from the top down, through verbal representations to subordinates and thence to their subordinates. The design and construction could not have proceeded without elaborate systems of symbolic communication.

Frank Zappa - Muffin Man

2011-05-24T11:38:00.000-07:00

Bibi, Cry Baby

2011-05-24T11:06:00.000-07:00

"A sailor throws a drowning man a life preserver. How dare you, screams the man. Because of you, people are going to think I can’t swim."

That is how Beinart hears Netanyahu's paroxysm over the "1967 borders with mutually-agreed swaps" reasonableness. The claim of indefensibility is, at the least, bizarre, and it's a claim which virtually all media outlets have repeated without investigating whether such is the case. Nobody has asked Netanyahu to give evidence for the assertion-come-talking-point, a position which has gone mysteriously unspoken by serious parties over the past decade.

What's obvious is that large, out-posted settlements in the West Bank make the defense of Israeli citizens more difficult under any conception of a contiguous Palestinian state. Oh, wait...

Nature of Reality Panel

2011-05-19T16:01:00.000-07:00

Coyne Contra Brooks

2011-05-18T12:09:00.000-07:00

Jerry Coyne lucidly schools the NYT columnist and author of The Social Animal on the problems inherent in the group selection hypothesis (read Coyne's full article here):

In yesterday’s New York Times, Brooks writes about recent scientific “advances” in the understanding of human altruism. And he signs on to the idea that altruism evolved by group selection.
I disagree, and see Brooks as ignorant about the true scientific issues. If true altruism (which I define here) is indeed a trait that’s deleterious to an individual’s reproductive fitness, then it could, as Brooks envisions, evolve only by the differential survival and reproduction of groups.
That form of evolution would work like this: although genes for altruistic behavior would be constantly weeded out of populations (for altruists, by definition, sacrifice their own genetic heritage for others), those genes might survive if groups that contained higher proportions of altruists were the groups that persisted, giving rise to descendant groups more often than groups lacking altruists. (The idea here is that groups without altruists wouldn’t flourish very well.) That’s group selection, and it’s how Brooks sees altruism as evolving:
In his book, “The Righteous Mind,” to be published early next year, Jonathan Haidt joins Edward O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson, and others who argue that natural selection takes place not only when individuals compete with other individuals, but also when groups compete with other groups. Both competitions are examples of the survival of the fittest, but when groups compete, it’s the cohesive, cooperative, internally altruistic groups that win and pass on their genes. The idea of “group selection” was heresy a few years ago, but there is momentum behind it now.
Let’s be clear about what biologists really know about group selection and altruism. If true human altruism has a genetic basis, it is individually disadvantageous and could have evolved only by differential propagation of groups. That’s very unlikely, since it requires that the rate at which altruist-containing groups reproduce themselves must be high enough to counteract the substantial rate at which altruism genes disappear within groups. It’s unlikely because groups reproduce much less often than do individuals! Further, once a group consists entirely of altruists, any non-altruistic genes would rapidly invade it, as their carriers reap the benefits of altruism without sacrificing their reproduction.
Now if we’re talking about apparent altruism, in which individuals appear to sacrifice their reproductive interests but actually reap hidden genetic benefits, then we don’t need group selection to explain it. As I’ve written in a longer post on this topic, kin selection (“inclusive fitness”) can do it, as can simple individual selection based on reciprocity or, simply. selection for the advantages of cooperation, as in hunting lions.

Free Speech Must Include License to Offend

2011-05-17T11:00:00.000-07:00

Despite one of the weakest opposition panels I've ever seen argue for IQ2US (managing to be both hysterical and boring), the debate is worth watching in full, if only because it is important to be able to spot poor arguments for the curtailment of free-speech that function by sneakily blurring its meaning (such as by raising copyright law and classified information as examples of speech which is not protected). The eternally insurmountable task for those opposed to the primacy of this right over all others is to answer the question of who will decide what is eligible for censorship. Whose responsible ears will decide what is right to impoverish from our own?

Fight of the Intellectuals

2011-05-14T23:14:00.000-07:00

Out from all the whinging surrounding the ethics of the Bin Laden raid and the American response to it, Paul Berman's is a voice of clarity. Contrary to those who claim the event as insignificant, the slaying of so infamous and effective a monster is a symbolic triumph of the secular, liberal-democratic vision over its detestable opposite. We can be glad that Bin Laden is dead, and we can be so guiltlessly.

Berman, on why it matters, in TNR:

“Relentlessness is good. Relentlessness has a philosophical resonance, which everyone intuitively understands. The war between Al Qaeda and the United States has always rested on a dispute over the meaning of history. Al Qaeda has always believed that God wishes the resurrection of the ancient Islamic caliphate. And Al Qaeda has always regarded America, with its Christian origins, as the ultimate obstacle to the resurrection of the caliphate. Al Qaeda’s militants have always believed that, as the representative of God’s will, they will ultimately win. Al Qaeda has therefore called for a stubborn and even eternal struggle—the kind of struggle that might lead earnest and idealistic people to agree to commit suicide on Al Qaeda’s behalf.

America, however, has also been stubborn. Ten years, compared to eternity, is nothing. Still, relative to the lifetime of a human being, ten years is not, in fact, nothing. For ten years the United States has been relentless. And now that America can boast of its achievement, the American relentlessness has suddenly become eloquent, and this is more than good. It is crucial.

The United States adheres, after all, to its own theory of history, even if most of us do not like to acknowledge anything of the sort. In our own liberal and democratic theory of history, doctrines like Al Qaeda’s are doomed to defeat. In our estimation, the mad and fantastical doctrine about resurrecting an ancient caliphate is comparable to other doctrines that we have encountered over the last century—the doctrine about resurrecting the Roman Reich in an Aryan version or the doctrine about resurrecting the ancient Russian peasant communes in the form of a proletarian Soviet civilization. We liberals and democrats look on doctrines of that sort as reactionary protests against the authentic march of progress, and as nothing more than reactionary protests. And we believe that, if we struggle sufficiently, if we are relentless enough, the reactionary protests will go down to defeat.”

Which brings to mind this reflection from another fight-not-flight intellectual, who, upon the towers' fall, thought:

“Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that."

Freedom and Neurobiology - John Searle

2011-05-11T10:14:00.000-07:00

The Goblin's Final Moments

2011-05-03T10:46:00.000-07:00

Click to Enlarge.

"Osama bin Laden died on Walpurgisnacht, the night of black sabbaths and bonfires. Not an inappropriate night for the Chief Witch to fall off his broomstick and perish in a fierce firefight. One of the most common status updates on Facebook after the news broke was “Ding, Dong, the witch is dead,” and that spirit of Munchkin celebration was apparent in the faces of the crowds chanting “U-S-A!” last night outside the White House and at ground zero and elsewhere. Almost a decade after the horror of 9/11, the long manhunt had found its quarry, and Americans will be feeling less helpless this morning, and pleased at the message that his death sends: “Attack us and we will hunt you down, and you will not escape.” - Salman Rushdie

Woodkid, Iron.

2011-05-02T17:03:00.000-07:00

OBL Death Opportunity for Rethink

2011-05-02T17:02:00.000-07:00

Beinart in TDB:

Even before the U.S. killed bin Laden, the Arab Spring had already rendered him irrelevant. President Obama now has his best chance since taking office to acknowledge some simple, long-overdue truths. Terrorism does not represent the greatest threat to American security; debt does, and our anti-terror efforts are exacerbating the problem. We do not face, as we did in the 1930s, a totalitarian foe with global ideological appeal. We face competitors who, in varying ways, have imported aspects of our democratic capitalist ideology, and are beating us at our own game.

Bin Laden was a monster and a distraction. It is good that he is dead, partly because the bereaved deserve justice, but also because his shadow kept us from seeing clearly the larger challenges we face. The war on terror is over; Al Qaeda lost. Now for the really hard stuff; let’s hope we haven’t deferred it too long.

And Frum, on growing up:

Those of us who oppose this administration’s economic and foreign policies have had so many valid points to make.

Yet some have insisted on traveling beyond those valid points. They have called the president “post American.” A “Third world dictator.” An individual whose behavior could only be interpreted as “Kenyan post-colonial.” A “thug in chief.” They have tried to present US politics not as a choice between liberal and conservative, but as a choice between American and non-American, between real Americans and between a dangerous dark-skinned intruder. They have sought to portray the President as a man who could not be trusted to lead the country because he owed no loyalty to the country – because he did not belong in the country.

After the events of the past 72 hours, those kinds of attacks should be finished now. It’s a cleaner world without bin Laden soiling it. And American politics will be cleaner for the expunging of the malicious fantasy of the president’s non-Americanness.

El Guincho

2011-05-01T11:33:00.000-07:00

Bombay from MGdM | Marc Gómez del Moral on Vimeo.

Vatican Diversions / Celebrity Culture

2011-05-01T11:31:00.000-07:00

Barbie Latza Nadeau in TDB on JPII beatification:

The Vatican is hoping that their “rock star pope” will once again inspire a fractured congregation in a time of global despair. For weeks, those who feel he failed the church through the pedophile sex scandal voiced their disappointment at his fast-track to sainthood. Rod Pead, editor of the traditionalist Catholic magazine Christian Order, believes that the beatification is capitalizing on the Pope’s “celebrity status” and that his legendary charisma and achievements are not enough to elevate him to sainthood. He says that it is John Paul II’s popularity and the knock-down effect it has on the church as a whole and not his rectitude that is the driving force to santo subito. “By pushing it through at such scandalous speed they degrade and undermine the beatification process itself,” Pead told The Daily Beast. “Remember, out of more than 260 popes only 76 have ever been canonized and of those only three have been canonized in the last 700 years.”

The Third and the Seventh

2011-04-27T10:40:00.000-07:00

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.
CG in its entirety. This deserves your time in full-screen.

Arguments Over the Libyan Intervention

2011-04-26T14:26:00.000-07:00

It is bewildering that those who deny we are bound by any moral responsibility to intervene in Libya simultaneously argue that once we grant the desperate calls of the bloodied and besieged, we thereby morally commit ourselves to an endless, all-out war.

Hours before the U.N. Security Council would vote on Resolution 1973, a morning on which Benghazi awaited its inevitable fall, Andrew Sullivan asked “if the UN Resolution passes... do we not have a moral obligation to support [the rebels] in an open-ended civil war?... we do know that if we break it, we own it, do we not?”

But the consequence is one that simply does not follow. The chaos in the Maghreb is not, as they say, a case of “you break it, you own it.” Though critics habitually raise the specter of Iraq, to which that cliché is more aptly applied, this relative difference in culpability for the Libyan crisis is salient. We did not “break” Libya, and none but a tyrant did. If this argument is to be applied here, it should be reworded “you [try to] fix it, you own it,” which to anyone should seem the most absurd of rules.

A moral responsibility to protect civilians exists whether or not we choose act in its service; but such a responsibility doesn't exist in a vacuum, nor is it of infinite weight. If there comes a time when NATO countries begin to suffer in such a way as to undermine their responsibilities at home, they would not then be morally bound to continue the operation unreasonably or without end. Isn't it better to be able to say “Libya, when you asked for help, we tried to help you,” than it is to apologize, mealy-mouthed and blushingly, that we the world's rich and liberal democracies could not afford the risk of trying?

Americans are justifiably war-tired, but we should not let the predictable ignorances of nonequivalency between Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan so tunnel our vision that we balk at the mention of intervention, even when obliged, so long as it involves a Muslim country. Of the arguments critical toward the operation in Libya, those styled by exasperation at the very mention of military action in another “Muslim” land are guilty of a sort of indiscrimination. These also taste somewhat of the Bin Ladenist claim that countries occupying certain portions of this planet are immunized from foreign intervention by an ancient book.

Thankfully, the opinions of Middle Eastern citizenries are passionately against Gaddafi. That a vital portion of the support for action came from a two-faced body comprised almost entirely of despotic regimes is irrelevant. The unprecedented support from the Arab League gave a measure of political cover to the voting nations of the U.N.S.C. (We should, however, pause to consider why such is even deemed necessary when debating whether to attempt the salvation of an Arab populace under attack. When a family owns and disposes of its citizens less humanely than a farmer culls diseased livestock, coming to that public's requested aid is something which should not require “cover.”)

Quickly out-populating the others, however, is the consistency argument. This is the wet noodle critics repeatedly throw up in hopes that it will stick, but it's tired and overcooked and I wish they would consign it to the dog bowl. This most frequent criticism asserts that if we intervene to prevent the massacre of democrats in one case, we must therefore intervene in all cases where liberalizing forces are suppressed or murdered. But consistency, so defined, is a foreign policy fallacy.

The philosophical dictum “ought implies can” is virtually elevated to the state of a law, and a non-pedantic application of it in response to the cries for “consistency” is clarifying. Surely if an action cannot be taken, a nation cannot be morally obliged to take it. Why should we not, in the spirit of consistency, take military action in iron-fisted Saudi Arabia (or North Korea, for that matter) where dissidents suffer so morbidly? The answer is simple: because we cannot. To do so would be suicidal.

If the question asked is “why not Bahrain,” seemingly small and powerless enough on its own, it is answered when, on second thought, the kingdom is recognized as the Saudi protectorate it is today. Military intervention in Yemen, where Al-Qaeda and its analogues have well-established terror networks, would have been, likewise, unwise. The one small and totally inadequate consolation is that Yemeni civilians are not currently being airbombed by their own military.

Oddly, many who make the consistency argument think themselves to have reinforced it with the question “why not Darfur?,” when in fact many of these same critics (and incidentally, myself) believed that inaction to be a regretful scar on our collective conscience. “Why not Darfur,” then, is exactly right.

In fact, in its service, critics can bring themselves to some fascinatingly bizarre analogies when dispatching the “why Libya” argument. Consider the following, from Sullivan:

“If we are prepared to do this in Libya, why not in Congo, where the casualties and brutality have been immensely greater?”

But exactly who, or what movement, would Sullivan put forth as a candidate for Western military support in the septo-national mess that is Congo? Both sides use rape as a weapon, and the rebels fancy that eating the native Pygmies will supplement their strength and courage, and so do. How would a military air-campaign be conducted through the obstruction of a rainforest canopy and at which targets should such an operation be aimed? Impossibly and “not enough information to say” are the answers, and my guess is that Sullivan would agree with both. Therefore, to ask “why not Congo” in relation to Libya is to advance nothing more than a fallacy of indiscrimination. The definity of the targets in the Libyan case, while imperfect, is in blinding contrast with the indefinity of targets in others.

It is important to consider the frameworks under which we discuss the case for and against action. In doing so it becomes clear that of the better arguments against intervention, most fall primarily under a realpolitikal calculus rather than under a moral one. Understandably, many legitimate criticisms hinge on affordability or diplomatic costs, which are obvious material implications of intervention to consider, but are insufficient when operating at the exclusion of primarily moral concerns. If we agree that an ethical responsibility to protect civilians is valid, then a discussion remains to be had regarding the lengths to which such a responsibility extends. I would argue that the Libyan case is, shall we say, covered.

Of course, the morality of military action can never be totally separated from strategic and monetary concerns; military efforts overseas, just though they may be, can come at high cost. But, so far, the arguments against aiding the Libyan rebels have been heavily weighted to the material side of the ledger. We owe ourselves and others more than that. There is something deeply wrong with a critique of military action in which the conspicuous omission common to the criticisms of both left and right is one of moral justice.

It has often been repeated that since our and our allies' vital interests in Libya are few-to-none, we have no justification for involvement. But should our policy therefore be to protect civilians from slaughter in only those cases where the U.S. has material or strategic interests? No, abiding such base conservatism is the very habit that stained us with the precedents of Rwanda and Sudan.

It is hard to know what the man who imagined himself the future king of an United Africa and who, apparently without irony, wanted the union's currency called the “Afro,” has in his mind (other than probably circus music); but while he shops the living room for material from which to misconceive his next sorcerer's gown, Gaddafi is simultaneously orchestrating the poisoning of wells, the rape of children, and the infiltration of plain-clothed, fratricidal snipers into “his” cities.

We should take some pride in our decision to help Libyans put an end to this twisted circus, and we should remember that whereas without help the revolution was foredoomed, the intervention was, and still is, not.

How Would It Sound If You Couldn't Understand American English?

2011-04-24T10:35:00.000-07:00

Like this, probably. The girl at the start asks something close to "have you ever written a song that doesn't say anything?" (h/t 1, 2, and 3).

Christopher Hitchens' Voice, Unspoken

2011-04-22T12:45:00.000-07:00

Hitchens was scheduled to speak at the American Atheists Convention, but is forced to offer this beautiful letter in place of himself.

Dear fellow-unbelievers,

Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before. I hope to help defend and pass on the lessons of this for many years to come, but for now I have found my trust better placed in two things: the skill and principle of advanced medical science, and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion. It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstitition. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.

That essential sense of decency is outraged every day. Our theocratic enemy is in plain view. Protean in form, it extends from the overt menace of nuclear-armed mullahs to the insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools. But in the past few years, there have been heartening signs of a genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry. The cheap name for this lethal delusion is religion, and we must learn new ways of combating it in the public sphere, just as we have learned to free ourselves of it in private.

Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.

As the heirs of a secular revolution, American atheists have a special responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution that patrols the boundary between Church and State. This, too, is an honor and a privilege. Believe me when I say that I am present with you, even if not corporeally (and only metaphorically in spirit...) Resolve to build up Mr Jefferson's wall of separation. And don't keep the faith.

Sincerely
Christopher Hitchens

Thanks to PZ for getting this out first. We can only hope for extreme luck in this case.

What's in a Meme?

2011-04-22T10:15:00.000-07:00

James Gleick explains a continuum in Smithsonian Magazine:

What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life.’ It is information, words, instructions,” Richard Dawkins declared in 1986. Already one of the world’s foremost evolutionary biologists, he had caught the spirit of a new age. The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment. “If you want to understand life,” Dawkins wrote, “don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.”

We have become surrounded by information technology; our furniture includes iPods and plasma displays, and our skills include texting and Googling. But our capacity to understand the role of information has been sorely taxed. “TMI,” we say. Stand back, however, and the past does come back into focus.

[…] Jacques Monod, the Parisian biologist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1965 for working out the role of messenger RNA in the transfer of genetic information, proposed an analogy: just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an “abstract kingdom” rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas.

“Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms,” he wrote. “Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role.”

Ideas have “spreading power,” he noted—“infectivity, as it were”—and some more than others. An example of an infectious idea might be a religious ideology that gains sway over a large group of people.

More.

Symmetry

2011-04-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

Symmetry from Everynone on Vimeo.

Salman Rushdie on Ai Weiwei's Detention

2011-04-20T11:28:00.000-07:00

In the New York Times:

It seems the regime, irritated by the outspokenness of its most celebrated art export, whose renown has protected him up to now, has decided to silence him in the most brutal fashion.

The disappearance is made worse by reports that Mr. Ai has started to “confess.” His release is a matter of extreme urgency and the governments of the free world have a clear duty in this matter.

…We can perhaps bet on art to win over tyrants. It is the world’s artists, particularly those courageous enough to stand up against authoritarianism, for whom we need to be concerned, and for whose safety we must fight.

Not all writers or artists seek or ably perform a public role, and those who do risk obloquy and derision, even in free societies. Susan Sontag, an outspoken commentator on the Bosnian conflict, was giggled at because she sometimes sounded as if she “owned” the subject of Sarajevo. Harold Pinter’s tirades against American foreign policy and his “Champagne socialism” were much derided. Günter Grass’s visibility as a public intellectual and scourge of Germany’s rulers led to a degree of schadenfreude when it came to light that he had concealed his brief service in the Waffen-SS as a conscript at the tail end of World War II. Gabriel García Márquez’s friendship with Fidel Castro, and Graham Greene’s chumminess with Panama’s Omar Torrijos, made them political targets.

When artists venture into politics the risks to reputation and integrity are ever-present. But outside the free world, where criticism of power is at best difficult and at worst all but impossible, creative figures like Mr. Ai and his colleagues are often the only ones with the courage to speak truth against the lies of tyrants. We needed the samizdat truth-tellers to reveal the ugliness of the Soviet Union. Today the government of China has become the world’s greatest threat to freedom of speech, and so we need Ai Weiwei, Liao Yiwu and Liu Xiaobo.

I recently read what is so commonly written: an apologetic for China's Orwellianism as something which is to be taken "in the context" of progress. That snakish phrase is, of course, one that we should cringe upon hearing when suppression of rights is the topic. It strikes me how many are willing to use "context" as the ocean in which to drown their guilt of silence. If anything, China's rising stardom requires more of us to be more critical, more loudly. A responsibility that I am guilty of failing.

- - - - - - - - - -

Somewhat relatedly, The Guardian summarizes Martin Amis on Prince Charles (h/t 3QD):

When he met the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip "appeared very surprised" at the bestselling author's profession. "Ah, you're a writer?" he said, according to Amis. Prince Charles, though, is "charming", with a "pretty extraordinary laugh, like the snore of a pig". Amis added that he recalled "one fairly memorable conversation with him on the subject of Salman Rushdie, just after the fatwa, in 1989. He was very anti-Rushdie. I asked him why. He told me: 'I'm sorry, but when someone insults the profound beliefs of a people ...'" Amis replied that a novel is not a stance. "It insults nobody. It asserts nothing. A novel is a game, a mind play," he told Charles.

Richard Feyman, Spooky Mirrors

2011-04-18T10:38:00.000-07:00

Lawrence Krauss gave a great talk yesterday at Cal-Tech on his just-released Feynman biography Quantum Man, at the close of which he played a short clip from Horizon's The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. It reminded me of Feynman's perspicuity in explaining the complex, and lighter adventures such as this one:

"Khyber Impasse"

2011-04-18T09:32:00.000-07:00

James Traub sighs at the masochistic marriage the U.S. must maintain with Pakistan:

There's something special about a relationship that only gets worse, but never actually falls apart. Pakistan has been selling itself to the United States as a national security bulwark since the earliest days of the Cold War, and Washington has been an eager and often uncritical buyer, subcontracting to Pakistani military and intelligence operatives much of the effort to arm and train the mujahideen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Only in the 1990s, with the Soviet menace gone, did Washington allow the bonds to fray altogether, over Pakistan's nuclear program. The terrorist attacks of 9/11, however, gave Pakistan a new purchase on its self-appointed role. And the country's unique combination of a nuclear arsenal and a thriving population of Islamic extremists has made it not so much indispensable to Washington as terrifying to it. The United States can't walk away, and Pakistan knows it can't, and the United States knows Pakistan knows. Etc. It's the diplomatic equivalent of Tolstoy's dictum that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own special way.

…This is the crux of the new dilemma: The fundamental incompatibility of Pakistani and American national security interests can no longer be avoided. And it can't be cured; it can't even be admitted.

…A divorce would be satisfying; but Pakistan needs U.S. aid, equipment, and training, and Washington is too afraid of what Pakistan might become to let it go. Christine Fair, a Pakistan expert at Georgetown University, is convinced that Islamabad has the upper hand in the confrontation and thus notes that U.S. officials will swallow their ire and make real concessions on drones and perhaps also on the presence of special operations forces.

Dennett on Determinism and Evolved Free-Will

2011-04-14T11:32:00.000-07:00

Begin at the 13:35 minutes mark:

QFTD

2011-04-14T11:27:00.000-07:00

"The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply. Broadness of mind, curiosity, willingness to accept strangers, allowing them to become citizens really quite easily, assimilate to their arrival...

There is a tremendously cramped feeling now, a mean spirited feeling, that was very much to be detected in the last election cycle. People talking in what I would once I suppose described as Dennis Thatcherite terms, you know, curmudgeonly, but rather less amusing than him. The country is filling up with riff-raff, the country is going to the dogs, the President doesn’t seem to be sixteen anas to the rupee, he might even be a Kenyan. Petty, spiteful stuff of that kind and coming from some quite senior people. It hardly even deserves the name of cynicism or pessimism, it’s just sour and nasty and boring."

Christopher Hitchens, on Beltway climate trends.

Womanhood, Under Saudi Ownership

2011-04-12T12:39:00.000-07:00

On the Banning of the Burka

2011-04-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

Mike Labossiere gets it right in The Philosopher's Magazine:

The main stated justification for the law is that it is intended to protect Muslim women from oppression. The idea seems to be that Muslim men in France force women to wear the veil. As such, it is a sign of male oppression. This line of reasoning has been used to win over support on the left in France.

This does have some appeal. After all, Islam does not have the best track record when it comes to the treatment of women. It is also the case that some Muslim women are forced to cover themselves against their wills.

However, the law does not merely forbid forcing women to cover up. Rather, it also outlaws appearing in public while covered. While the fine and jail sentences for forcing someone to cover up are greater than those to be imposed on those who are caught covered up, it seems reasonable to question the claim that this law is aimed at protecting women from oppression. A law aimed at protecting women would, it seem, only punish those who forced women to cover up. Women who freely chose to cover themselves should, one would imagine, be exempt from such punishment. After all, a person who chooses to dress in a certain way would not seem to be the victim of oppression-even if others might not approve of her choice.

We should aim our criticism at the barbaric and patriarchal ideology out of which the burka is a manifestation, rather than carelessly legislate the wearing of cloth.

Codex

2011-04-11T11:59:00.000-07:00

Budget Federally Funds Sectarian Schools

2011-04-11T11:39:00.000-07:00

Washington has effectively drained the available reserves of public exasperation, so expect this "small" perversion to go relatively unnoticed, even among secularists. From Rob Boston at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State:

As part of the [budget] deal, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) got his way and breathed new life into a controversial school voucher plan in Washington, D.C. Boehner has pushed the voucher idea relentlessly, and it apparently became a bargaining chip during negotiations. Unfortunately, President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) agreed to Boehner’s demands.

This is really is quite remarkable. This budget deal, as many critics have pointed out, slashes federal spending in lots of programs. Millions of Americans may take hits. Yet somehow, amidst all of the slicing and dicing, Congress managed to come up with millions in taxpayer dollars to revive a scheme that subsidizes religious and other private schools in D.C.

They did this, even though (as AU has pointed out repeatedly) the voucher plan undercuts civil rights and civil liberties. It directs federal funds to Catholic, Protestant and Islamic schools that are free to indoctrinate children in the tenets of their sponsoring faiths and discriminate in hiring on grounds of religion and sexual orientation.

If you are a federal taxpayer, that means you will be putting your hard-earned money in the collection plates of religious denominations whether you like or not. It violates the fundamental American principle that religion must be supported by voluntary donations, not coerced support from the taxpayers.

More.

Sam Harris vs. William Lane Craig

2011-04-09T11:14:00.000-07:00

Find Harris' debate with one of the nimbler sophists around here.

Tim Confronts a Postmodernist

2011-04-08T10:53:00.000-07:00

Romneyating on a Shutdown

2011-04-08T10:52:00.000-07:00

David Frum imagines what's going through Romney's mind as shutdown looms:

To get nominated, I need to discredit the Tea Party before it can veto me.
To get elected, I need a double dip recession in 2012.
Thanks to Paul Ryan, both these outcomes have just come a big step closer.
Here’s how Ryan helps me win the nomination:
This budget proposal will end in tears, especially if there is a government shutdown tomorrow. The Democrats know that few Americans understand the difference between the 2011 Continuing Resolution and the 2012 budget. The Democrats will pound home the message that Republicans shut down the government so that they can cancel Medicare for everyone under 55, gut Medicaid, and cut taxes for the rich. Ryan is the hero of the party today. Six weeks from now, Republicans will feel about him the way the Confederacy felt about George Pickett six weeks after Gettysburg. Battered and chastened, Republicans will be less resistant to the safe choice demanded by big party donors: i.e., me.

On Standby...

2011-03-21T00:02:00.000-07:00

... until April 6th. (Image by Surat Lozowick)

Just War

2011-03-20T12:05:00.000-07:00

Massimo Pigliucci in Rationally Speaking:

Is this the right thing to do for the international community? Hell yes.

Readers of this blog know that I am no warmonger, I do not support nation building, and I’m generally very suspicious of the motives of any government when it comes to “spreading democracy” and the like. And yes, I am perfectly aware that Libya is a major oil producing country.

That said, it seems to be that in this case — at least so far — the coalition that is attacking Qaddafi is getting it exactly right. First, the goal is to protect civilians from an ongoing slaughter. Second, there is an actual uprising going on within the country, and one that has a decent chance of succeeding with international support. Third, diplomatic approaches have been tried and have failed. Fourth, the coalition is truly broad and truly international (unlike, you know, that other coalition...). Fifth, the United Nations has given a clear imprimatur to military action. Sixth, there is no discussion (at least at the moment) of ground troops or nation building.

While there is nothing ideal in the world of politics, and there certainly isn’t anything clean about any war, the above conditions — it seems to me — make this initiative as clear and close to ideal as possible.

Read on.

Have it Both Ways

2011-03-20T09:20:00.000-07:00

Scumbag Amr Moussa:

"We will inform the U.N. Security Council of our request to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya," Moussa said. "The U.N. Security Council should decide how it will be enforced."

Not a peep throughout the following process at the UNSC, and now, ass-covering.

"The Moral Imperative to Intervene"

2011-03-19T17:01:00.000-07:00

From March 17th, Shadi Hamid in Democracy Arsenal:

For realists, I would love to hear how doing nothing in Libya was going to help U.S. security interests. Having an oil-rich pariah state that could very well return to supporting terrorism and wreaking havoc in the region would be disastrous, creating Iraq part 3 and making it more likely we'd have to intervene sometime further into the future, at much greater cost and consequence. Did we not learn from the quelched Shia uprisings of 1991? Or from standing by idly (or supporting) the military coup that ended Algerian democracy in 1991? The Arab world suffered for the international community's failure to do the right thing. Literally, hundreds of thousands died as a result. Having Libyans and Arabs feel that we betrayed them yet again would do wonders for our already plummeting credibility, particularly after the Obama administration has moved to back autocratic regimes in Bahrain and Yemen, rather than the peaceful protesters struggling for their freedom and getting shot in the process.
Another argument we heard endlessly the past three weeks was that Arabs wouldn't want another foreign intervention or that intervention would taint the protesters. Maybe we should have asked the Libyans themselves whether they agreed with this assessment, which, again, was based on an incorrect reading of the Iraq war. Libyan rebels have been pleading for Western military intervention for quite a while now. A child had held up a poster in Benghazi saying "Mama Clinton, please stop the bleeding." When you're bleeding you don't really care you saves you. You just want to be saved.

More.

Action in Libya Is Way Overdue

2011-03-17T13:24:00.000-07:00

If the U.S. maintains its position miles behind the U.K., France, and even the Arab League, by continually vacillating and expressing “deep concern” at the slaughter of an Arab people fighting to emancipate themselves from the yoke of tyranny, it will be another stain on the history of American foreign policy serving to further drain the U.S. of what moral authority it retains. If we stand idly by while screams calling for the Western freedoms we so rightly extoll turn instead into the unheard screams of a madman's vanquished, we will reinforce the narrative that the U.S. only cants about freedom and democracy to serve its own interests. This, it seems to me, can only multiply hatred toward the U.S. and radicalize a betrayed population.

To those critics who predictably chime “Iraq War” at the very mention of a no-fly-zone over Libya: advocating one strategic blunder by reminding us of another does neither the U.S. nor the Libyans any good. It is unsound to analogize aggression towards Iraq to a defense of Libya, where a people currently undertaking revolutionary upheaval are suffering active slaughter and desperately calling for an international intervention which has the support of the Arab League. It would serve many of these critics, since they are so quick to raise the specter of Iraq, to remember that the no-fly-zone over Iraq was something of an effective policy, at least after 1993 when Saddam's aggressions toward patrolling aircraft were met with effective reprisals (even in the years between 1998 and 2003, during which Saddam announced he would no longer observe the NFZ, no manned aircraft were shot down).

Failure to lead the Security Council to authorize action against Gaddafi's ongoing war crimes will make a mockery of us and of the Council's credibility and force. And doing so might not be as difficult as those opposed to further action say. The U.N. General Assembly's 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide initially defined genocide as including political killings, though objection from the USSR led to a compromise which removed this criteria. But the force of international law is adequately equipped against Gaddafi with the subsequent adoption of UNSC Resolution 1674 in April 2006, which contains within it the reaffirmation of following paragraphs 138 and 139 of the World Summit Outcome Document of 2005, and compels the UNSC to act under circumstances such as the one we have so far only watched in horror:

138. Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through appropriate and necessary means. We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it. The international community should, as appropriate, encourage and help States to exercise this responsibility and should support the United Nations to establish an early warning capability.

139. The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapter VI and VIII of the Charter, to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action , in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the UN Charter, including Chapter VII, on a case by case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. We stress the need for the General Assembly to continue consideration of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity and its implications, bearing in mind the principles of the Charter of the United Nations and international law. We also intend to commit ourselves, as necessary and appropriate, to help states build capacity to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity and to assist those which are under stress before crises and conflicts break out.

So, as far as my limited understanding of int'l law takes me, invoking R.1674 against Libya is legitimate. A veto from the Chinese would expose them to the charge of hypocrisy, if not moral decrepitude, and would paint for the international community an exceptionally unappealing view of China's rising stardom. Similar pressures apply to Russia.

Summoning the memory of past escapades in Islamic countries is not a good argument for letting a historic opportunity to rid the world of a murderous tyrant pass us by. Libya is not Iraq. The time to act was yesterday.

Taimane Gardner's Toccata @ Circus Freak

2011-03-16T11:24:00.000-07:00

Bach's Toccata with what sounds like Bizet and other flourishes on the ukulele via BoingBoing.

The Face of Shakespeare

2011-03-15T12:00:00.000-07:00

Morgan Meis saw it, and was unsettled:

We've been told that Shakespeare was actually Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon. We've been told that he was Edward de Vere, or some other English nobleman in disguise. The details of these various theories don't matter so much. The point is the disbelief, the sense that Shakespeare can't just be Shakespeare.

I, for one, find myself both angry at Shakespeare and frightened by Shakespeare. The anger is perhaps easier to explain. He took too much. He took too much literature for himself and that's not fair. He broke some sort of unwritten rule about how much literature goes to each man. I couldn't tell you exactly how much that is, but I can say that Shakespeare took too much, and that it angers me sometimes.

The fear comes from a hazier place. I suppose I simply fear a person who was able to view the human beast so truly. Is there something infernal about the wisdom of Shakespeare, something uncanny that has the taint of the dark arts upon it? Strangely, I am much less afraid of the genius of the scientists, partly because their abstract insights into the nature of reality often go hand-in-hand with an intense befuddlement in the face of human-sized things. That seems a fair trade. To glimpse truths about the nature of the material world, it is required that you renounce any great understanding of the creatures who live within it. But to have the huge insights of Shakespeare, to look so deeply into the human soul, to know its every nook and hidden corner, seems, somehow, to contravene the limits that are given to all men.

More. And here is Meis' grandiloquent twitter feed.

Bernard-Henri Lévy on Libyan Intervention

2011-03-12T14:26:00.000-08:00

They Say of the Acropolis...

2011-03-11T11:02:00.000-08:00