Month: August 2008

Jason Kottke and Merlin Mann mull it over.

David Kravets is outraged by some highly inflammatory file sharing propaganda.

A reader writes:

Yes, K-Lo is beyond bat-shit crazy.  However, when I read her post (thanks for the link) I was moved by the enormous sympathy she had towards the "womenpriests." The Catholic Church is what it is and there are somethings that by definition are incredibly difficult to change. (Not that they shouldn’t, but there are institutional reasons that if we mess with we need to be aware of the consequences.)

As you know, the decision against ordination of women is a "Deposit of Faith" issue. Rightly or wrongly, the Church for 2000 years see this as something that isn’t acceptable for someone who is by definition a Catholic.  However, reading between K-Lo’s lines, she acknowledges that these women by their Ministry are acting in a way that is pleasing to Jesus.  Perhaps they are going against the institutional Church but are still deserving of Grace.  In fact, to my reading, she is pleading with the Church to find some way to reach a way to live with these women.

I am not justifying the exclusion of women from the Priesthood.

Yet, I don’t think that it is done lightly by the Church and I don’t think the Church treats women as second class citizens in the same way other Religions treat women. Their emphasis on education of women (through the Academy system) and the positions of power of women through the leadership of Universities and Hospitals would seem to work against that point.

I know, you are going to bring up the separate but equal point. I agree it has validity, yet, to some extent I see a real effort to give women a significant if different role. In history, often the only chance a woman had at education, was to become a Nun. Times have changed and the Church needs to figure out a way to deal with it, but, slamming K-Lo for accepting the definitions while she is trying to figure out that way, misses the point of her post.

(Note, I wasn’t raised Catholic but married into it. My daughter is going to a Sacred Heart High school. The quality of her education and they way it is teaching her to think and question is remarkable.)

All these points are well taken. I wasn’t slamming K-Lo: her dilemma is part of all the orthodox who see the heterodox clearly doing God’s work. I was disagreeing. I wouldn’t be as complacent, however, that the Church hierarchy wrestles with the question of women’s equality within the church. And my point is more that this "deposit of faith" needs to be examined to make sure it isn’t merely a deposit of injustice.

(Photo: Carsten Koall/Getty.)

Yes, that was a strange little blog post on Obama’s alleged dissing of Hillary. Now, it makes more sense:

A reader adds:

That Bill Kristol quote on the DNC’s glass ceiling really deserves its own award category.  You can call it the Bill Kristol award, given to any commentator or alleged journalist who makes an argument that the author themselves clearly does not actually believe, in an effort to manipulate public opinion. This is a whole category of right wing "journalism" (see, e.g. Fournier, Dick Morris, etc) that needs to be decisively called out.

Hmmm.

Here’s one aspect to policing a vast and ungovernable country, where duplicity and human error can easily lead to unintended, but still devastating tragedy:

Col. Rauf Ahmadi, a spokesman for the police chief of the western region, denied that there were any Taliban in the village at the time of the strikes. “There were no Taliban,” he said by telephone. “There is no evidence to show there were Taliban there that night,” he said.

The dead included 50 children, 19 women and 26 men, Colonel Ahmadi said.

A presidential aide who declined to be identified said that the Interior Ministry and the Afghan intelligence agency had reported from the region that there were no Taliban present in the village that night. The Afghan National Army, whose commandos called in the airstrike along with American Special Forces trainers, were unable to clarify their original claim, he said.

A spokesman for the Afghan Army declined to comment on Saturday.

A tribal elder from the region who helped bury the dead, Haji Tor Jan Noorzai, said people in the village were gathered in memory of a man who was anti-Taliban and was killed last year, and that tribal enemies of the family had given out false information.

“It is quite obvious, the Americans bombed the area due to wrong information,” he said by telephone. “I am 100 percent confident that someone gave the information due to a tribal dispute. The Americans are foreigners and they do not understand. These people they killed were enemies of the Taliban.”

Ambers considers. Meg Whitman sure is out of left-field. And what are her views on abortion?

My Sunday column – metastasized to 3,000 words this week – riffs off the different ways of being American that Obama and McCain represent. A reader adds:

There’s a simple way to sum up your list of contrasts between the two candidates – McCain hails from the old south, while Obama embodies the northern experience.

McCain blends two proud southern traditions. His strong sense of honor and cheerful belligerence do indeed mark him as Scotch-Irish. But he also bears the unmistakable marks of the Anglo-Southern gentry, with its  commitment to independence and liberty. These are proud traditions that can lay claim to innumerable great Americans. They have also produced a distinctive vision of America – a celebration of individual liberty, a hostility to government, an emphasis on the force of arms, and (perhaps above all) an abiding faith that the American system rewards the virtuous and punishes the unworthy.

Obama, on the other hand, combines the two principal strands of the Northern experience. He is, as you note, the son of an immigrant who came to this country in search of a better future. A self-made man, Obama rose from humble roots through education, hard-work, sacrifice, and luck. His is also an urban tale – a product of the melting-pot, he was schooled in New York and Boston, rising to power in Chicago. But the other half of his heritage is that of the American farmer, of grit and determination, and of small town life.

These traditions have produced their own notion of America – of a land that draws its strength from diversity and rewards ambition, but also one that can be capricious and even cruel, that can grind down the individual, unless the people band together to lift each other up. In urban Progressivism and in rural Populism, this strain of American thought insists that liberty depends on government keeping the playing field level. It’s a debate as old as the country itself.

Ultimately, of course, America draws its strength from all of these traditions, and the differences between McCain and Obama are of emphasis and degree. But when I listen to Obama, I hear in his words an appreciation for liberty and a skepticism of government intervention that signal his willingness to incorporate the strengths of the southern tradition. When I listen to McCain, I hear no similar acknowledgment of the need to level the playing field, or of the necessity of creating opportunities for those who do not inherit them. Obama comes closer to a synthesis of these strands, and that, I suspect, is one reason why he appeals to such a broad spectrum of Americans. McCain emphasizes one set of traditions at the expense of the others, and that, more than anything else, seems to account for the distinctly regional nature of his appeal.

Check out McCain’s first answer to Couric’s question about his forgetting how many homes/mansions/compounds he owns: