Month: August 2007

The ADL head is coming in for criticism over this quote:

"We have never negated but have always described the painful events of 1915-1918 perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against Armenians as massacres and atrocities," Foxman said in a written statement yesterday. But upon reflection, Foxman continued, "the consequences of those actions were indeed tantamount to genocide."

One blogger is underwhelmed. Jewcy isn’t so sure either:

[Foxman] seems to acknowledge the genocide, without explicitly stating that he does. He says that he’s consulted with those who "acknowledge the consensus," that it was "tantamount to genocide," and "If the word genocide had existed then, they would have called it genocide." It would have been nice to see a simple "It was a genocide," but this is certainly a major step forward.

But the rub is that Foxman is trying to placate his critics while maintaining his opposition to the Congressional resolutions that would acknowledge the genocide. My bet: it’s too late for that. And I’m certain that most Armenian-American activists will not be satisfied with this statement.

There are differences between how men and women communicate, but they are not what you might expect, a new study finds:

Participants were categorized as facilitative or nonfacilitative, and results indicated that their conversational partners responded to them in a systematic way regardless of gender. Over time, however, women and men shifted their speech towards gendered patterns. Men’s talk increased, their utterances became longer, and they asked fewer questions of their partners. Women increased their use of minimal responses, reduced the amount they spoke, and asked more questions. Over time, women and men’s language became more clearly differentiated.

Dalian, China, 5 pm.

Thomas Barnett isn’t posturing about Iraq; he’s thinking:

In the end, no one wants partition but the Kurds, hence my call for the 2K solution: draw down and pull back in southern Iraq and move bulk of forces to Kurdistan (where we are small) and Kuwait (where we are already large) and simply wait out the Sunni-Shia fight, which our generals on the ground don’t want because they’d view that path as their operational failure. But frankly, political requirements (i.e., protecting our public’s willingness to stay militarily engaged in the region) should overrule that professional desire. Political leaders don’t tell generals how to fight, but they should–in our system–tell them when our fight has logically concluded.

By releasing the Sunni-Shia dogs of war, we force Saudi Arabia and Iran to fish or cut bait. Whatever they choose, we save our troops’ lives and our political will to remain engaged.

To have unleashed this conflict and then stay to try to put it in slow-motion seems to me the worst of al worlds. Barnett has a point.

"In the middle of a crisis even more dangerous than Vietnam, President George W. Bush sits isolated in the White House, surrounded by a dwindling band of advisers, and continues to talk about winning in Iraq. His supporters in Congress and the media seize every short-term success, in Washington or Iraq, to flog their opponents as defeatists and lay the groundwork for a stab-in-the-back narrative. His critics in Congress and the media clamor for him to admit defeat and begin an immediate withdrawal. Over the course of 2007, the two sides haven’t begun to negotiate the possibility of a compromise; instead, they are driving each other to increasingly bitter resistance. The national tragedy in Iraq is taking place against a political culture personified by the departed Karl Rove: tactically brilliant, strategically blind, polarized into highly partisan bases and orthodoxies endlessly repeated through the mass media. You don’t often hear it mentioned, but this might be one of the most important differences between Vietnam and Iraq," – George Packer, on his New Yorker blog.

It was one of the ten most intense Atlantic hurricanes ever reported. What we can and can’t say for sure.

My new colleague, Megan McArdle, has jumped into the Atlantic ocean with a big splash. And the water’s a little nippy (what lesbians call "bathwater"). Money quote:

A gigantic single-payer system is a pretty blunt instrument; it transfers money from one group, the young and healthy, to another group, the old and sick. It does not distinguish much more finely than that between the deserving and undeserving within that class. This is why discussions of particularly deserving or undeserving people within the larger class, such as your fine old Uncle Bob who served his country in two wars before becoming a minister, are irrelevant; as with the surfers and taxi drivers, almost any class we can specify will contain some very worthy members who deserve more from society than they have gotten. What we need to know is whether the class of old and sick people as a whole are much more deserving than the class of young and healthy people; whether our transfers do more good than harm.

Single payer advocates seem to invariably assume that the answer is yes. This is a natural reaction; the old and sick inspire our sympathy. But I am not sure that, as a group, they should also summon our sense of social injustice.

Read the whole thing. The woman has guts. Which is why some seem to hate her.

Blech. State-of-the-art sleazeballs should know better than to leave voicemails.

In a crowded field, he even beats Clinton. A full quarter of Republicans say they are definitely against him.

Two videos from the frontlines: one angry and bitter, one not-so-much. I hope they don’t shock Victor Davis Hanson’s delicate sensibilities.