by Chris Bodenner And the best Christmas card ever: Andrew is off the blog for the week, but he may pop on to write a post or two on the torture report (his parting takedown of Cheney is here if you missed it). To help in his absence are guest-bloggers Michelle Dean and Will Wilkinson, whose introductory posts are here and here, … Continue reading The Best Of The Dish Today
I’ve been really heartened by many Christians’ responses to the Torture Report’s cataloguing of evil done in our name and behind our backs. The Catholic Bishops need to do much more, but this was a start: The Catholic Church firmly believes that torture is an ‘intrinsic evil’ that cannot be justified under any circumstance. The … Continue reading The Best Of The Dish This Weekend
I thought I’d end today with a quote from my dear, late friend, Christopher Hitchens, a dedicated opponent of Jihadist nihilism but also a civilized man who knew torture when he saw it. On the CIA: Now we have further confirmation of the astonishing culture of lawlessness and insubordination that continues to prevail at the … Continue reading The Best Of The Dish Today
One thing we’ve learned these past few weeks is that seeing something with your own eyes can make all the difference. Watching what happened to Eric Garner forced us to reconsider the aggression of current policing protocols in ways that no abstract argument could. And seeing what is actually done to pigs and chickens in … Continue reading The Best Of The Dish Today
Ross made a crucial point about TNR today: The New Republic as-it-was, the magazine I and others grew up reading, was emphatically not just a “policy magazine.” It was, instead, a publication that deliberately integrated its policy writing with often-extraordinary coverage of literature, philosophy, history, religion, music, fine art. It wasn’t just a liberal magazine, … Continue reading The Best Of The Dish This Weekend
I’m heart-broken today about what can only be called the corporate manslaughter of my alma mater, The New Republic. And yes, many of us regard that place – for all its and our flaws – as an alma mater, the equivalent of a college, and our time there as formative and life-changing. It was a … Continue reading The Best Of The Dish Today
Scroll down for some reaction to the decision by a Staten Island Grand Jury not to indict – even for a lower charge of manslaughter – a cop who killed a man for selling loosie cigarettes. In other news, Republicans now want mass deportation for undocumented immigrants over a path to citizenship – by a … Continue reading The Best Of The Dish Today
Is the gang-rape story at UVA credible? We’ve been covering it for a while now – perhaps a little too credulously – but a reader did raise some questions about its credibility in our second post. My old roommate and friend, Rich Bradley, had a ballsy must-read on it last week that raises one obvious … Continue reading The Best Of The Dish Today
We don’t seem to have finished discussing Ferguson, so one more thought. I agree with those who argue that the police’s interaction with young black men is, in too many cases, riddled with bias and far too quick to use lethal force. But I agree with others that the Michael Brown case is not the … Continue reading The Best Of The Dish Today
You can’t beat Cleese and Maher on PC bullshit: Money quote from Cleese: Any kind of fundamentalism is terribly funny. Of course it is. I particularly liked Cleese’s comment about the condescension involved in ruling certain groups as impermissible targets of humor. There’s this deeply patronizing idea that minorities are fragile, terribly vulnerable, unable to laugh … Continue reading The Best Of The Dish This Weekend
