by Conor Friedersdorf
— How enjoyable to listen in as Dayo Olopade and John McWhorter talk about race in America here and here.
— James Kirchick is spot on about movement conservatism's unfortunate descent into exactly the kinds of racial grievance mongering it once critiqued. It's an excellent blog post, and excerpting won't do it justice, so read the whole thing.
by Patrick Appel
A reader writes:
The statement that religion "undermines development of logical thinking" is asserted with absolutely no evidence whatsoever. All I can say is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Show us the evidence before throwing around assertions otherwise based on faith. More importantly, though, this reader obviously hasn't raised any children. I have an 18 year-old and a 15 year-old which my wife and I have raised in the church. They are both at the stage where they are questioning and challenging everything. The idea that I could possibly "brainwash" them into believing anything is specious. Instead of trying and failing, I am encouraging them to think through things for themselves. Maybe they will stay in the church, maybe they won't, but either way it will be their decision. This pattern is so common as to be cliche. My brother and I both did the same wander-in-the-desert thing – I returned to the church, he didn't.
Another reader adds:
I just want to dissent to one small part of this reader's e-mail. She/He wrote, "[D]emanding that the little ones believe these often ridiculous things to be true with no logical or empirical evidence, which I am convinced undermines children's development of logic and critical thinking."
My Mom taught high school English Lit for 15 years in a high school that had a fair amount of economic diversity and a lot of racial and ethnic diversity. One thing she found is that she could tell the kids that went to religious services from the ones that didn't.
It was easiest with her African-American students and toughest with her Asian students, with Latino and white students in between, but she could almost invariably tell. One of the ways she could tell was their ability to see symbolism and archetypes in literature. The students that were raised going to religious services had a much easier time understanding and gaining meaning from literature. It didn't even matter much what religion the kids practiced – Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism. Religion deals with symbols, myth, archetypes and believing what you cannot see. These are intellectual skills that cross over into non-religious contexts.
How much of science depends on believing in unseen forces? Advertising brings in archetypes and myth to convince you to buy a product. Movies, music, and music videos use symbols all the time.
The other issue is most adolescents go through a period of questioning their religion. They may come out the other side still a practitioner, but that period of questioning develops some intellectual muscles as well by requiring them to really examine the world they are in.
This is not to say religion is always good for intellectual development. My Mom had to bite her tongue when a student's mom didn't want her child to read Antigone because it wasn't "Christian". As much as Mom wanted to point out that it was exceedingly difficult to write Christian literature before Christ was born, it just wouldn't have made a difference. Any religion that requires its followers to remain voluntarily ignorant of the world around them is highly problematic, but that actually applies to a smaller percentage of followers than most atheists will acknowledge.
Another reader:
Atheists are awfully quiet about the one historical attempt to mass-inculcate – and enforce – atheism. Of course this attempt was communism. Stalin mass-murdered up to 50 million of his own people, plus a few million non-Soviet citizens. My dear atheist brothers & sisters in Science, it's not religion that bends people to pursue curious, terrorizing, or murderous ends – it's any belief, or non-belief, taken to extremes that turns human beings into pitiless thugs and murderers. Were religious faith and religions to vanish from human kind at noon today, mankind would not be propelled or elevated to some new and Utopian age.
The Stalinist argument is a blunt cudgel. Unless any of the new atheists are advocating for state-enforced atheism, it has limited relevance. Both atheists and the faithful tend to "weak man" the other. Atheists like to focus on fundamentalists while believers tend to hone in on the angry atheist fringe. Another reader writes:
A reader of yours wrote, "Religion, unlike space explosions in Star Wars or the Lochness monster, states that it is the unalterable truth of the creator and usually stipulates that disbelief will lead you to a lifetime of torture in hell." Well, I'm Jewish, and there's very little in Judaism that is the "unalterable truth" of anything–everything in our religion has been argued over and debated for centuries, and still is. And as far as I know this is the case with all major religions. As for "a lifetime of torture in hell," Judaism posits no such thing. Though the reader gives himself a bit of a loophole with his use of "usually" there, he is clearly speaking about a very narrow element of religious culture, I would guess fundamentalist Christianity and other similar systems, and his language in no way describes the beliefs or lives of most religious people. Using such a broad brush on such a nuanced topic is what rankles me about both fundamentalist believers and smug nonbelievers: each treats all of those in the other camp as though they were represented by the smallest, loudest constituency among them. They aren't. We aren't. I respect atheism as perfectly valid, rational, and completely worthy of respect, as do most religious people I know, and as do most atheists respect faith. And I wish the angry minorities in each camp woud put down their megaphones and stop rolling their eyes at how naive and judgmental they keep assuming the other one is.
by Conor Friedersdorf
Conservative wisdom is best demonstrated by instances when humans trying to remake the world back measures that do more harm than good. The rise of communism is perhaps the pre-eminent example.
But what about significant changes that do more good than harm? The right would do well to think more carefully about how to identify these instances, especially given the conservative predisposition to misjudge and oppose them. (e.g. the Civil Rights Movement.)
One striking thing about America's conservative coalition, with its affinity for the Founding era and its ties to Christianity, is that its members believe quite deeply in movements that radically remade the world, albeit in the distant past. Has a historical figure as radical as Jesus Christ ever existed? Did a political revolution ever remake the world as thoroughly as America's did? Even if these events are surpassed by one or two others, the point stands: Jesus Christ and the Founders shared a willingness to upend received wisdom by appealing to faith and reason respectively.
Edmund Burke is rightly read by conservatives today partly because he had the wisdom to support the American Revolution, and to harbor grave doubts about subsequent events in France. Is conservatism today capable of analogous feats of discernment? I haven't any particular failure in mind as I write this, merely a general conservative failure to grapple with what seems to me the most obvious way conservative thinkers might be led by ideology to the wrong conclusion.
Nor have I seen the left grapple with its own predisposition for erring in the opposite direction. Perhaps I am merely ignorant of some large body of political theory. In any case, it hasn't filtered out to the masses in the way that other liberal insights have.
Does anyone have thoughts on how either side might avoid errors in judgment in general, rather than in any particular case? Any recommended reading?
by Conor Friedersdorf
Tampa Bay Online reports:
HAVERFORD, Pa. (AP) — Seven suburban Philadelphia children had a brush with the law for selling without a permit – selling lemonade, that is. But police say it was all a misunderstanding. A neighbor called Haverford Township police July 10 about the sales. He says the youngsters were going door-to-door and he didn't think they were being properly supervised.
A responding officer told the kids they were violating an ordinance that bans sales without a permit.
But Deputy Chief John Viola says the officer didn't know the law doesn't apply to anyone under 16 years old.
That caveat — let's call it the lemonade stand exception — improves on the norm in many cities, hopefully affording young people an opportunity to experiment with entrepreneurship without running afoul of the law. But it also lays bare how unnecessary permitting laws are. After all, it isn't as though stuff sold by kids is safer or of higher quality than stuff sold by adults. Absent the heavy hand of the state I might already have tried selling mango lassi on the street in Washington DC. Unfortunately, its residents are missing out on a tasty, refreshing beverage instead. Maybe I should move to Haverford and hire an underage sales force…
(Hat tip Riehl World View)
by Patrick Appel
by Patrick Appel
FP's yearly failed state index is out. The interactive map is here. From the analysis:
Answering the question of which failed states demand attention might well come down to which are deemed to pose the biggest threat to the world at large. But even the widely presumed linkage between failing states and terrorism is less clear than many have come to assume since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks sounded the alarm about the consequences of governments not in control of their territory. Take Somalia, once again the No. 1 failed state on this year’s index. A recent report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, drawing on captured al Qaeda documents, revealed that Osama bin Laden’s outfit had an awful experience trying to operate out of Somalia, for all the same reasons that international peacekeepers found Somalia unmanageable in the 1990s: terrible infrastructure, excessive violence and criminality, and few basic services, among other factors. In short, Somalia was too failed even for al Qaeda.
by Chris Bodenner
Roger Cohen writes:
What self-respecting nation would attribute the appearance in the streets of three million protesters convinced their votes were stolen to Zionists, “evil” media and British agents? (The former British ambassador to Iran told me with a smile last January that Tehran was an interesting place to serve “because it’s one of the very few places left on earth where people still believe we have some influence!”)
And the darkness:
While Rafsanjani spoke, Ahmadinejad was speaking in Mashad. “As soon as the new government is formed, it will enter the global sphere with a power that is 10 times greater than that of the West and overthrow the West from its hegemonic position,” he said. I heard the president say the same thing, again and again and again, over the course of a three-hour press conference two days after the election. He is suffering from a pathology. Rafsanjani is not alone in believing it is dangerous.
But according to this video of his speech in Mashad, the joke's on Mahmoud:
by Conor Friedersdorf
In response to the disconcerting news that the Obama Administration is sending dozens of DEA agents to Afghanistan, Kelley Vlahos writes:
Does anyone else think it odd and just a bit mission creepy that “the most prolific expansion in DEA history” would occur on foreign soil? This expansion, or “surge,” will come in the form of “dozens of DEA agents” descending on Afghanistan, because, as one DEA official pointed out, after eight years of fighting to prop up the central government there, President Hamid Karzai & Co. are apparently unwilling and unable to resolve the drug problem themselves.
So, enter the American Drug War, Afghan style. Unfettered by
anything resembling the U.S Constitution, DEA agents are seemingly given carte blanche to go after Afghan drug kingpins belonging to the Taliban or “influential tribes allied with it” and hauling them back to U.S federal courts if need be. Their task also includes pursuing corrupt government officials fingered as assisting the $4 billion drug trade.
Why do I label this news disconcerting?
— Ultimately the only effective way to stop enemies abroad from enriching themselves off black markets in narcotics is to legalize drugs, thereby ending the black markets. The idea that sending a few dozen DEA agents to Afghanistan will solve the problem is fantasy that is contradicted by decades of experience.
— These DEA agents, who will be "unfettered by anything resembling the US Constitution," are inevitably going to return to the United States, where they'll be sorely tempted to employ the most effective methods that they learn abroad on American citizens. It is a bad idea to militarize civilian law enforcement personnel!
— This seems to be just one more way that the executive branch can sidestep Congress while increasing America's foreign entanglements. In the future will we send DEA agents to any country where drugs are being produced and enriching terrorist organizations? Which is to say, will we send them anywhere and everywhere?
by Robert Wright
Did Christians steal the idea of heaven from the Egyptians?
by Robert Wright
This map is brought to you by the perennially concerned folks over at 
The Dish 