Month: July 2009

An Undogmatic Daniel Dennett

by Robert Wright

My week of guest-blogging at the Dish finds me walking into an animated conversation about Daniel Dennett and the "new atheism". I’m looking forward to getting into more God talk in the next few days, but for now let me say briefly that: (a) I like this Dish reader’s terminology–'atheism' vs. ‘anti-theism’–very much; (b) Last week at the Huffington Post I published an assault on the anti-theist part of the “new atheism”; (c) This assault was so poorly worded, and got so much atheist blowback, that I half-apologized for it here; (d) Dan Dennett can indeed sound intolerant at times, but I think he comes off as pretty open-minded in this several-year-old video exchange between me and him. In the exchange, I’m arguing that maybe natural selection is subordinate to some larger purpose—a purpose imbued by a Deistic God, or maybe by extraterrestrials who seeded our planet a few billion years ago after inventing or refining the algorithm of natural selection, or whatever. Dan starts off very resistant to the idea, but he rolls with the punches and is never dogmatic. Check it out.  

The Chinese Model

by Patrick Appel

Fear Of A Red Planet explains why it isn't replicable:

Firstly under the nationalists and now under the communists China has been subject to the greatest and most successful program of nation-building ever seen. Whilst in India there are reportedly still whole villages in which nobody has ever heard of the country ‘India’, since 1912 the Chinese nation has steadily been built up, with ethnic and regional loyalties largely subsumed into the Chinese identity or race (????).

Whilst it is generally believed in China that this identity has existed for thousands of years, it is in fact an invention of nineteenth century theorists like Liang Qichao (???), intended to replace an imperial system fairly similar to the one that existed in the Austro-Hungarian or Russian empires. This has largely succeeded, and it is only in those areas with ethnic identities so entirely different to that of the majority as to be incompatible (such as Tibet and Xinjiang) that it has failed. The high level of nationalism in China (Australian China-hand Ross Terrill described it as “the nearest thing China has to a national religion”) has allowed the Chinese state to survive pressures which would shatter other countries, as such the Chinese model cannot simply be transplanted to countries with strong regional identities.

Puppycide

by Patrick Appel

Radley Balko reports on the recent series of stories about officers needlessly shooting dogs. Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights in Maryland, had his two dogs shot when the police mistakenly raided his house:

It is easy to imagine that some breeds of dog might legitimately pose a threat to police officers in volatile situations. But that Calvo’s two black labs posed any serious risk to an armored, heavily armed SWAT team stretches the bounds of credulity. The same can be said of a host of recent dog shootings in which a police officer said he felt “threatened” and had no choice but to use lethal force, including the killing of a Dalmatian (more than once), a yellow Lab , a springer spaniel, a chocolate Lab, a boxer, an Australian cattle dog, a Wheaten terrier, an Akita, and even a Jack Russell terrier. Not small enough for you? How about a 12-pound miniature dachshund? Or a five-pound chihuahua?

Balkanization Heads West, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

The people who put that map of Western Europe together are smoking something pretty good. They lump together real independence movements with some chance to success (Scotland, Catalonia, Basque Country) with "independence movements" so obscure I have never heard of them, and I have lived in Baden-Wurttemberg, speak German, have a master's degree in European politics and write regularly on the subject.

That's not to say they don't exist, only to say that they're as prominent as the Alaska Independence Party was before Todd Palin got famous.  "Padania" is silly – there is no chance of Italy's breakup.  Corsica's problem is not separatism but mobsterism.  Breton nationalism is dead as Dillinger, as I can attest from a recent reporting trip there for a book I'm writing, and Norman nationalism virtually non-existent.

As for those three possible secession movements, Robert Wright is quite right that their impact would be blunted to almost nothing by the EU. They are also made possible by the EU;  most of those countries would never think they could go it alone without the trade bloc that already treats autonomous regions as major players.

Anyway, there's no fire here, not even a little one.

Empire Watch

by Chris Bodenner

Stephen Walt points to a NYT report and writes:

U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan are now spearheading a major effort at (drum roll) … prison reform. We've figured out that the brutal treatment that even petty criminals face while in jail is facilitating Taliban recruitment in the prisons, and so the United States is going to build some new facilities and try to get the Afghan government to change its incarceration practices. Your tax dollars at work.

Given that we are trying to defeat an insurgency, I don't have a big problem with any initiative that might weaken Taliban recruitment. But am I the only one who sees the irony in this situation? Prison reform is badly needed back here in the United States — where the incarceration rate is the highest in the world (Russia and Belarus — well-known bastions of freedom — are #2 and #3). In fact, the incarceration rate in the United States is nearly four times the world average, and nearly seven times higher than in the EU.  Recidivism rates in the United States are also high (about 60 percent), which suggests that prison life isn't doing a very good job of rehabilitating convicts. As sociologist Bruce Western has shown, this situation has far-reaching negative consequences. Although Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) has been trying to spearhead a reform effort, this hasn't generated a lot of momentum so far. So the Afghans may get significant prison reform before Americans do.

The Class Of Civilizations

by Patrick Appel

NYU is opening a campus in Abu Dhabi. Questions remain:

Is the export of a high-minded, elite liberal arts institution an act of “cultural imperialism”, or is it a rebuke to the pervasive belief in a clash of civilisations? How will NYU Abu Dhabi, an institution ostensibly dedicated to egalitarianism, treat the tens of thousands of migrant workers who will build and staff its campus? Can academic freedom survive in an Islamic state that is still formulating its own compromise between tradition and accelerating modernity? By the same token, will the school’s western students and professors show a willingness to compromise with a deeply religious and fairly paternalistic society?