Month: December 2008

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo. (Hat tip: Alan Jacobs)

Totten reports:

For the past two weeks I’ve been embedded with the United States Army in Baghdad, and I find myself unable to figure out what to make of this place. Baghdad, despite the remarkable success of the surge, is as mind-bogglingly run-down and dysfunctional as ever, even compared with other Arabic countries. Iraq is a dark place. At times it feels like a doomed country that has only been temporarily spared the reckoning that is coming. Other times it is possible to look past the grimness and see progress beyond the mere slackening off of violence and war. Is Iraq truly on the mend, or has a total breakdown been merely postponed? Opinions here among Americans and Iraqis are mixed, but nearly everyone seems to agree about one thing at least: terrorists and insurgents will respond with a surge of their own in the wake of the upcoming withdrawal of American forces.

I’ll place my bet that all the surge has done is postpone an inevitable "total breakdown." Obama’s biggest test will be resisting the temptation to stay once violence soars as US troops withdraw. But that’s what Clinton is for. She’s the armor on his vehicle out, and will provide the political cover for the necessary retreat.

Kottke applies the theory to virtual spaces:

Much of the tone of discourse online is governed by the level of moderation and to what extent people are encouraged to "own" their words. When forums, message boards, and blog comment threads with more than a handful of participants are unmoderated, bad behavior follows. The appearance of one troll encourages others. Undeleted hateful or ad hominem comments are an indication that that sort of thing is allowable behavior and encourages more of the same. Those commenters who are normally respectable participants are emboldened by the uptick in bad behavior and misbehave themselves. More likely, they’re discouraged from helping with the community moderation process of keeping their peers in line with social pressure. Or they stop visiting the site altogether.

That’s why, I suspect, Dish readers have long opposed adding comments to the posts. The only incivility on this site is my own. And has my name firmly attached to it.

Just be thankful it doesn’t take as long as it used to.

Ta-Nehisi and Megan are debating whether Jindal is the "next Obama."  Here’s Coates:

I’ve been pretty clear about my objection to hazy appeals to precedent, not out of any love for Obama, but because I think it’s weak thinking. I don’t like calling Obama the next Lincoln, anymore than I like calling Jindal the next Obama. Jindal is the Republican Obama if you think that Obama is just a "fish out water," dark-skinned politician. But if you’re like me, and you were thinking about politics, you’d think that a Republican Obama would have to beat the powerbrokers of his own party. He’d have to revolutionize campaign fund raising. You’d think he’d have to basically flip Massachusetts, New Jersey, Illinois and Wisconsin.

Steve Coll has a must read on Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based Islamist organization that Mumbai attackers reportedly had ties to:

One question that will certainly arise as the Mumbai investigations proceed is what the United States should insist the government of Pakistan do about Jamat [Lashkar’s charity] and Lashkar. Even for a relative hawk on the subject of Pakistan’s support for Islamist militias, it’s a difficult question—comparable to the difficult question of managing Hezbollah’s place in the fragile Lebanese political system.

To some extent, Pakistan’s policy of banning Lashkar and tolerating Jamat has helpfully reinforced Lashkar’s tendency toward nonviolent social work and proseltyzing. In the long run, this work is a threat to the secular character of Pakistan, but it is certainly preferable to revolutionary violence and upheaval right now. On the other hand, there is little doubt that the Army and I.S.I. continue to use Jamat’s legitimate front as a vehicle for prosecution of a long-running “double game” with the United States, in which Pakistan pledges fealty to American counterterrorism goals while at the same time facilitating guerrilla violence against India, particularly over the strategic territory of Kashmir, which Pakistan regards as vital to its national interests.

San Salvador, El Salvador 5.53 pm.

Nige on the mainstreaming of Hallelujah:

It seems that Leonard Cohen’s strange and beautiful song, which he spent a year wrestling with and was never entirely sure about, has – thanks to over-exposure and endless cover versions – not only entered the mainstream (making Simon Cowell yet more money along the way) but become all-purpose musical shorthand for any kind of vague spiritual yearning. It’s the melody that does it – the fourth, the fith, the minor fall. If only Len had stayed within his usual, shall was say, limited melodic horizons, the song would have been safe – but alas it seems he’s inadvertently gifted the world with… a new Imagine, to be lazily reached for every time a little effort-free, content-free spiritual uplift seems called for.

The Dish rounded up several versions of the song in May.

The Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism will release its report this week. The bottom line:

The odds that terrorists will soon strike a major city with weapons of mass destruction are now better than even, a bipartisan congressionally mandated task force concludes in a draft study that warns of growing threats from rogue states, nuclear smuggling networks and the spread of atomic know-how in the developing world.

Gordon Chang’s prescription delineates the immense difficulty of doing anything to stop it:

We must, for instance, disarm North Korea, stop Iran and Syria, and stabilize Pakistan. And to do that, we have no choice but to summon the political will to end Russian and Chinese proliferation of nuclear technologies.

And end world hunger and cure cancer. WMD blogger Armchair Generalist is more sanguine about the actual threat. I fear the worst. It’s the way I am.

Der Spiegel profiles a woman who has perfect episodic memory:

People say to me: Oh, how fascinating, it must be a treat to have a perfect memory," she says. Her lips twist into a thin smile. "But it’s also agonizing."

In addition to good memories, every angry word, every mistake, every disappointment, every shock and every moment of pain goes unforgotten. Time heals no wounds for Price. "I don’t look back at the past with any distance. It’s more like experiencing everything over and over again, and those memories trigger exactly the same emotions in me. It’s like an endless, chaotic film that can completely overpower me. And there’s no stop button."

It’s a kind of mini-version of the hell of immortality. Forgetting and dying are as integral to being human as remembering and living. And yet we cannot cherish the relief of death or the gift of receding memory. That’s how far our society has strayed from true Christianity (and how far the pro-life fetishists have migrated from the message of Jesus.)

(Hat tip: Frauenfelder)