Month: July 2008

Michelle Cottle is "royally brassed off" that so many Americans see Afghanistan as not worth fighting:

By allowing itself to become distracted from Afghanistan–not to mention babbling on dishonestly and confusingly about the nonexistent connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda–the Bushies have managed to convince much of America that we never should have bothered in the first place. This is outrageous. Afghanistan should have sent a loud, definitive signal to hostile regimes worldwide about the power and commitment of American power. Instead, barely half of this country thinks we’ve done a decent enough job to justify the entire endeavor.

What breed should the Obamas pick?

The news that an American official,  William J. Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, will attend a meeting led by Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, and Saeed Jalili, Iran’s nuclear negotiator, seems to me to be big news:

First, the Bush administration has decided to abandon its longstanding position that it will only meet face-to-face with Iran after it first suspends uranium enrichment as demanded by the United Nations Security Council.

Second, it infuses the negotiating track between Iran on the one side and the six global powers — France, Britain, Germany, Russia, China and the United States — on the other with new importance, even though their official stance is that no substantive talks can begin until the uranium enrichment stops.

It’s remarkable how much convergence is happening right now – most of it good news.

Judah Grunstein ponders a surge in Afghanistan. He’s as skeptical as I am:

…the Surge was a Baghdad-based troop infusion that, while allowing some more forward operations in other districts, concentrated on securing the urban centers where Iraq’s sectarian violence (ie. civil war) was playing out. Kabul, on the other hand, is perhaps the only part of Afghanistan that’s nominally secured. And from what I understand, most of the actual territory being contested is in the broad expanses beyond Afghanistan’s few urban centers. That means that there’s less of a multiplying effect as troops are spread out over broader distances.

Radiohead’s new "House of Cards" offering. Pretty cool:

No cameras or lights were used.  Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar system that uses multiple lasers is used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

   

It’s beach time and, disgusted with Wii Fit, Todd Levin begins a fitness regimen designed in the 1920s:

One thing I definitely hadn’t counted on was Lesson 2: Nutrition. Here, Atlas outlines his mandatory dietary and lifestyle restrictions — no caffeine; no refined sugar; no bleached flour; no white rice; no fatty meats; no pickles, mustards, vinegar or other acidic spices; no soft drinks, coffee or tea; no staying up past midnight, ever. Reading that chapter was like having Charles Atlas ask me to list all my favorite things in the world, then grab the list from my hands, crumple it up and toss it — and some sand — in my face. (Atlas does make one notable exception for candy: "If you must eat candy at times, be sure it is of the very highest quality." Sounds like someone can’t live without his truffles.)

(Hat tip: Kottke)

An ungainly straddle.

John Judis backtracks on a 2006 article, when he "thought there was a good chance that there was a peacemaker lurking beneath McCain’s warrior exterior" and compares McCain to Nixon:

Nixon, who could get into a funk over domestic opponents, was capable of an eerie detachment when it came to evaluating foreign leaders. He could also appreciate the historic insecurities that led countries to distrust the United States and each other. He confined his apocalyptic warnings of a worldwide communist conspiracy to domestic politics. He understood that beneath the appearance of socialist solidarity lay growing hostility between Russia and China, which the United States could exploit.

By contrast, McCain is a radical idealist who wants to transform the world and is reluctant to acknowledge limits to this enterprise.

He imagines a "democratic" Iraq opposed to Iran and occupied indefinitely by American troops. And McCain does not seem to possess Nixon’s detachment when it comes to foreign affairs. He can’t see what drove Putin and now his successor to distance themselves from the United States; or what–since the time of the pro-American Shah–has driven Iran, irrespective of Ahmadinejad, to seek a nuclear capability.

A reader writes:

I read your (and your readers’) religious posts with great interest. Hell, I go to one of the top Catholic universities in the country. I have taken more theology courses than any human should.

That said, I’m probably an atheist. What I am not, however, is an anti-theist. Religion has the same potential for good as for bad. If all faith ceased to exist tomorrow, there would still be war, persecution, crime, etc. What upsets me, and I assume many atheists, is the inability of many in the religious fold to admit that they might be wrong.

I fully understand and realize that I may burn in hell for my beliefs (or lack thereof). Why can’t they just say ‘look, this is what I believe, but who knows.’ It is the hubris of the theists that turns atheists into anti-theists.

This is a point I’ve made at length, of course. It’s the core argument of "The Conservative Soul," which is that doubt should be the animating principle of a conservative politics and a real faith. Again, Merton is invaluable (the quotes recently have been from "New Seeds Of Contemplation"):

You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt. You cannot believe in God unless you are capable of questioning the authority of prejudice, even though that prejudice may seem to be religious. Faith is not blind conformity to prejudice – a "pre-judgement". It is a decision, a judgement that is fully and deliberately taken in the light of a truth that cannot be proven. It is not merely the acceptance of a decision that has been made by somebody else.

How many believers follow Merton’s advice?

Yesterday bloggers jumped on this New York Daily News article about Obama "scrubbing" his website of surge criticism. The McCain campaign provided a handy side by side comparison of the new and old content. See for yourself what has changed.