Month: May 2009

The Atlantic's new correspondents blog has launched. You can visit the group site or any of the blogs individually. Here's the line up: Richard Florida, Daniel Akst, Alex Gibney, William Haseltine, Hua Hsu, Lisa Margonelli, Richard Posner, Harry Shearer, Edward Tenner, Abraham Verghese, Lane Wallace,  and James Warren. You can subscribe to the firehose RSS or to an individual correspondent's feed. Harry Shearer!

They are already churning out posts. Posner still thinks that the economic crisis qualifies as a depression:

Richard Florida looks at where we should locate high-speed rail:

New periods of geographic expansion require new systems of infrastructure. Ever since the days of the canals, the early railroad, and streetcar suburbs, we've seen how infrastructure and transportation systems work to spur new patterns economic and regional development. The streetcar expanded the boundaries of the late 19th and early 20th century city, while the railroad moved goods and people between them. The automobile enabled workers to move to the suburbs and undertake far greater commutes, expanding the geographic landscape still further.

Mega-regions, if they are to function as integrated economic units, require better, more effective, and faster ways move goods, people, and ideas. High-speed rail accomplishes that, and it also provides a framework for future in-fill development along its corridors

And Lisa Margonelli worries about  the oil glut:

Given that oil prices are likely to rise as the economy recovers, we might spend this time thinking about how to mitigate their impact or at least hold them from rising too fast. We could be proactive about reducing US oil demand by getting people into more efficient transportation, but fast.

I got my British fogies muddled up. A reader, as always, comes to the rescue. And it's Chesterton at his sardonic and wise best:

I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may be inside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and draw dangerously near the outside.

So long as he thought of men in the abstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as those who labor and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them. By going to look at their unfamiliar manners and customs he is inviting them to disguise themselves in fantastic masks and costumes. Many modern internationalists talk as if men of different nationalities had only to meet and mix and understand each other. In reality that is the moment of supreme danger–the moment when they meet. We might shiver, as at the old euphemism by which a meeting meant a duel.

Travel ought to combine amusement with instruction; but most travelers are so much amused that they refuse to be instructed. I do not blame them for being amused; it is perfectly natural to be amused at a Dutchman for being Dutch or a Chinaman for being Chinese. Where they are wrong is that they take their own amusement seriously. They base on it their serious ideas of international instruction. It was said that the Englishman takes his pleasures sadly; and the pleasure of despising foreigners is one which he takes most sadly of all. He comes to scoff and does not remain to pray, but rather to excommunicate. Hence in international relations there is far too little laughing, and far too much sneering. But I believe that there is a better way which largely consists of laughter; a form of friendship between nations which is actually founded on differences.

Mike Elliott gets it:

Just as important:

Obama's arrival does remind me of Thatcher's and Reagan's. Different time; different challenges; different philosophy. But it feels as historic to me; and maybe one day, that judgment will be confirmed. Or not.

Condi Rice tries to walk back her statement that if Bush authorized something, it was not illegal. She says instead – in a cosy conversation with Leon Wieseltier – that the president ordered that interrogation go to the limits of the legal. My own sense, from a few off-the-record conversations as well, is that president Bush simply said: do what you have to do, but make sure it's legal. Cheney ran with that. Bush meant it as cover. He needed legal cover to torture in a systematic way. And, because this was the Bush administration, they did what the great leader asked. Even though it was, in fact, impossible. And was impossible. And so America became a torturing country. And Rice sat by and let it happen. And now wants to be in polite society.

I do not believe in being polite to war criminals. I believe in prosecuting them.

An interesting interview with the NYT. Money quote:

On the two-state solution sought by the Americans, he said: “We are with a state on the 1967 borders, based on a long-term truce. This includes East Jerusalem, the dismantling of settlements and the right of return of the Palestinian refugees.” Asked what “long-term” meant, he said 10 years.

Apart from the time restriction and the refusal to accept Israel’s existence, Mr. Meshal’s terms approximate the Arab League peace plan and what the Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas says it is seeking.

A young Pakistani boy looks on as he walks through the Kacha Garhi IDP camp on May 4, 2009 in Peshawar, Pakistan. UNICEF and UNHR have been working closely together to give assistance to thousands of people displaced by fighting between the Taliban and the Pakistan Army. By Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images.

One might imagine that a brief reading of the Gospels would lead to an understanding that we should not, as Christians, abhor whole groups of people, or treat them as anathema, or regard their difference as a threat. In fact, a brief perusal might lead one to believe that Jesus emphatically saw this embrace of the other as a core value. And then we have the kind of Christianity that is more supportive of torture than atheism and can say something like this:

Sam Wurzelbacher has every right to keep his children away from anyone. But he is instilling bigotry at an early age. As is his party.

A reader writes:

I think these analogies (such as between rape and torture) are helpful in terms of how we analyze our own morals. I think you originally alluded to rape many months ago when you posted an account of the forced feeding of Guantanamo inmates in hunger strikes. At the time, the inmates were powerless to their captors and had but one recourse to exert control over their own bodies. In a desperate cry for freedom they attempted suicide by hunger strike. This was denied by force-feeding the inmates, which consisted of forcing a tube (sometimes violently and without lubrication) down the throat of the inmate through which food was pumped into the stomach.

I believe you compared this to rape and I think it was quite fitting.

Aside from that, I’ve always tried to make the comparison between terrorism and child rape, which are two equally heinous crimes in my mind. I make this analogy to try and understand how and why we (by we I mean America’s leaders 2001-2008) chose to treat terrorism as the worst possible crime. Suspected terrorists were denied access to a judicial system, subjected to dismal prison conditions, and tortured. Yet a suspected child rapist is still afforded basic rights guaranteed by the constitution.

We have to ask ourselves some serious questions, like “Is international terrorism worse than normal criminality?” “Is planning to bomb a subway train worse than planning a high-school shooting spree?” Why is one crime treated within the existing law while the other crime demands a circumventing of existing law?

They can't even get the corrections right.