Month: May 2009

Thomas P Barnett doesn't buy the Steynian Apocalypse.

A bit sappy, but this ad featuring a transgendered Argentinian gets the message right:

Maine becomes the latest state to legislatively enact marriage equality. Thanks, governor Baldacci. Money quote:

A teenager is still in custody. And this could happen to your home at any time.

Anonymous Liberal profiles Ed Whelan.

A reader writes:

The readers’ responses you posted were extremely interesting in the degree to which they tracked, often nearly verbatim, many of the more “rational”, or “intelligent” criticisms of the Big Three “Angry Atheists”. You know what I mean – Horgan must not be aware of this or that understanding of this or that doctrine; Horgan obviously doesn’t understand what this or that adept was talking about; Horgan ignores the temporal good thoughts/works/results of Buddhism/Buddhists; Horgan (and Florien) are insultingly simplistic, dismissive and glib in the face of a vast and ancient philosophical tradition; Horgan is arrogant and Buddhists are humble; blah blah blah.

There was nothing at all insulting or dismissive in Horgan’s six-year-old (!) essay. 

Anyone with any exposure to Horgan – from Bloggingheads, let’s say – would have to agree that he seems to be a perfectly nice, professorial guy. He didn’t say that belief in Buddhism was evil, or that Buddhists were stupid, etc. He didn’t even say, really, that Buddhism was wrong – all he said was that it is basically exactly like any other religion: it is supernatural, it posits human existence (or “consciousness” rather than “existence”, if you prefer – and what consciousness could we possibly be talking about here other than humans’?) as the purpose of the Universe, it is pre-modern, and, thus and finally, it is irreconcilable with a scientific, modern understanding of things. This is not a very controversial thing to say, but just in your own small corner of the Internet it provokes a blizzard of denunciations against Horgan and defenses against accusations he didn’t make (another interesting thing was how each of your respondents managed to get a dig or two in against your own preferred religion as well).

I don’t recall a whole lot of pushback from the Eastern belief-o-sphere against Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris’ attacks on the Abrahamic religions (note to pedants: I’m sure there was some here and there). It’s only now that they perceive (again, in an article from six years ago that you linked) their own ox to be getting gored that they are stirred to respond. When you strip away the “insulting” tone, the sect-specific fisking, and the critiques of religious institutions and their actions of The God Delusion et. al., there is really only one basic argument being made, and it’s the same as Horgan’s with respect to Buddhism – that all these ways of believing, formulated before we knew anything at all about anything really, and being grounded in supernaturalism, are simply not sufficient or necessary anymore. But I’ll bet your respondents didn’t quite see it that way until you pointed them to Horgan.

I’m tempted to think that these strenuously- and minutely-argued responses are the product of an understandable, if unfortunate, insecurity about the truth or worth of the foundations of the beliefs people choose to build their lives around, but in the end that’s not really for me to say. I just don’t see why the whole lot of you can’t just say “So what? It works for me” when things like this come up.

With that mordant spareness that marks his prose, TRB explains:

First, there's no such thing as a government policy of "torturing terrorists. " There's only a policy of torturing people the government thinks are terrorists. Many of the suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, subjected to agonizing stress positions, turned out not to be terrorists–not because the soldiers who captured them were venal, but because they were human.

Second, torture is designed to force prisoners to provide an answer the interrogator already knows. The torturer relents when his subject provides the "correct" answer. Intelligence gathering, by contrast, is designed to garner answers the interrogator does not already know.

All of this is obvious. The reason this debate is occurring at all – and in such bizarrely convoluted ways – is because defending the indefensible is always hard, even for smooth liars like Rove. And the English language is usually the first victim. Clear prose – as Orwell understood – is always the strongest weapon against lies. And Orwell would love the current TRB.

(Bonus non-Orwell, Sully fandom points for best use yet of "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!").

Mark Steyn replies to Martin Walker:

Oblivion Express? The existence of Muslims in a society is zero-sum in the long run? I do not doubt the dangers of Islamism in the West; but the notion that the West's own values of pluralism, toleration, moderate faith and economic freedom are somehow completely helpless and unattractive up against the most unreconstructed version of theocracy seems to me to reflect a deep ambivalence about the West in the first place. Kind of like Western leaders whose lack of confidence in the ability of free people to withstand fundamentalist terror requires abandoning all core values.

"No, I think that it's not time for that, but I think it's time for a debate. And I think that we ought to study very carefully what other countries are doing that have legalized marijuana and other drugs, what affect it had on those countries, and are they happy with that decision," – governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Can Cliff May explain what he disapproved of in Abu Ghraib? Isn't it all part of the same apparatus of "enhanced interrogation" he believes in so much? Where, in his mind, is the distinction between what was done there and the techniques outlined in the memos written by Yoo, Bybee, Bradbury et al? Or do only reservist torturers have to go to jail? And federalist society torturers get to retire at AEI?