Month: July 2008

“World Citizen As Nonsense,” Ctd

By Patrick Appel
A reader writes:

Poulos’s remarks ignore the historically expanding notion of community, from clan to village to city to nation. And the nation is by no means natural; it’s a metaphorical extension of kinship ties to an imagined community. Americans, to take one example, already feel these ties to millions of people that they have never met, never will meet, and many of whom are quite different from them. Perhaps adding another zero to the population in our community is too much, and perhaps the differences between the various populations in the world are too great, but it seems pretty historically myopic to discard the idea of world citizenship outright.

Another adds:

Pace Poulos, no individual can have more than a very small number of friends. Time is too limited, and each individual’s ability to reach across language and cultural barriers is modest.

But individuals can consider that their political decisions and behavior affect not only themselves and their community and their own nation, but also people in other nations. And draw from that obligations and concerns that are broader than purely national interest. That is citizenship, not friendship. When Jefferson wrote of the constraint imposed by "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," he was not writing about friendship. He was writing as someone does who understands what it means to be a citizen of the world.

Overstating The Threat?

By Patrick Appel
Jeffrey Goldberg recently sat down with Daniel Benjamin to talk about al Queda. Benjamin’s response to a question about experts who believe there is a 50 percent chance an American city will be attacked with a nuclear device sometime in the next ten years:

I don’t think the chance is anywhere near that high, but an attack with an improvised nuclear device is plausible. When you interviewed Michael Chertoff in Aspen, he said he thought that threat would be real in a couple years, right?  I ran a study a few years ago that brought together nuclear weaponeers and terrorism experts, and the conclusion, in essence, was that if al Qaeda could get the fissile material – the hardest part of the process, but by no means impossible – they would likely be able to build a weapon.  I’d put the likelihood of that happening at a small fraction of the 50 percent you cite, but the impact would be so devastating that we need to allocate lots of resources and effort to ensuring that doesn’t happen. 

Si Se Puede!

by Chris Bodenner
According to the latest polling, Obama is crushing McCain in the Hispanic vote — 66% to 23%.  (So much for his "Hispanic problem").  GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio:

"That number should be very, very sobering for the McCain campaign. The bottom line: Despite all of this positioning he’s taken on immigration, it’s shielded him nothing with Hispanics and it’s another point of distrust with Republicans."

World Reporters

By Patrick Appel

Danny Finkelstein chides Obama for brushing off the foreign press:

He hasn’t, as yet, given an interview to a foreign newspaper. He doesn’t, as far as I know, have any foreign press on his plane on this trip. He has received many requests by foreign journalists to accompany him on his travels in the US, but has turned them all down.

The Swing Voter

By Patrick Appel
Marc ponders a new poll on independent voters:

Among the key findings: Democrats have a built-in structural advantage among independents to the score of between five and ten points. But McCain remains competitive because a lot of those independents are ideological conservatives who have weak partisan attachments to the Republican Party. Without being pushed, 45% of the sample, including 59% of the self-described moderates in the sample, said they would vote for Obama and 39% said they would vote for McCain. With leaners, McCain makes up two points of the margin.