Month: September 2009

A reader writes:

No, it is not McChrystal’s job to bend to political pressure. It is his job to give the best military advice he can and if the President chooses not to follow that advice he should have the option to resign. This is not about challenging civilian control or exacting political damage. It’s about doing what he thinks is right and accepting the consequences. This is exactly the problem we had in the beginning with Iraq. Nobody was willing to tell the President what he needed to hear.

My point was that leaking this report and advertizing in advance that he will resign if the president doesn't adopt it goes way beyond what my reader suggests. What I dislike is the public posturing from a senior military figure as a way to advance what he believes is a political resolution. Another reader:

You think McChrystal's job is to "bend to political pressure." What a thoroughly asinine statement. It is certainly true that generals are beholden to civilian authority, but at the moment we are committed in Afghanistan and his job is to think in terms of stabilizing the region. Until and unless Obama decides to get out of Afghanistan ASAP, that is exactly what he is supposed to be doing.

In addition, all of your recent writing on this seems to ignore the obvious fact that Obama campaigned on seeing through Afghanistan while cutting down on our presence in Iraq. Are you ever going to reconcile this, or are you going to settle for your obligatory ranting about neocons? The position Obama campaigned on is not your own. Stop pretending otherwise.

I favored the war in Afghanistan and would still if the war had not been so badly botched and if I could see a way to achieve our goals at a reasonable expense within a reasonable time-frame. But it seems clear to me that a decades-long occupation is not what was intended in the first place, and increasingly bears little relationship to the actual threat.

Moreover, the notion that a position on a war should remain exactly the same – throughout eight years of failure – seems to me to be bizarre. Only ideologues committed to a priori support have the luxury of such a position. Certainly the war in Afghanistan was a war of necessity as opposed to the war in Iraq, which was proven unnecessary, because its core rationale was destroyed within a few months of the invasion. But no one has to sustain a war that is now twice as long as the Second World War if the results of the summer campaign, the exposure of deep corruption in Kabul and the use of Pakistan as a refuge make it a largely impossible endeavor.

We exist:

A consultant to the Census Bureau estimated there were roughly 100,000 official same-sex weddings, civil unions and domestic partnerships in 2008.

The legal immigration system – the same one that has kept me in limbo for a quarter of a century – is reaching a breaking point. Skilled immigrants are returning home to the more fertile opportunities in China and India because America makes it almost impossible for talented immigrants to move here:

"What was a trickle has become a flood," says Duke University's Vivek Wadhwa, who studies reverse immigration. Wadhwa projects that in the next five years, 100,000 immigrants will go back to India and 100,000 to China, countries that have had rapid economic growth. "For the first time in American history, we are experiencing the brain drain that other countries experienced," he says.

Multinational companies that belong to the American Council on International Personnel tell Executive Director Lynn Shotwell that skilled immigrants are discouraged by the immigration process, she says. Some can wait up to a decade for permanent residency, she says. "They're frustrated with having an uncertain immigration status," she says. "They're giving up."

Try two decades. And here's a simple example of the bureaucratic nightmare: the HIV ban was repealed in July 2008. It is still in force. No one knows for sure when it will actually be lifted. The federal government is simply paralyzed with red tape.

The Israeli prime minister is uninterested in doing the one thing that the president of the United States has asked for: freezing settlements in the land seized by Israel in 1967 as a way to jump-start negotiations. If Netanyahu won't agree to this, why should he agree to anything significant? And what, one wonders, can the administration do that could actually pressure the Israelis to realize that the US is serious?

A reader writes:

You said:

My notion of a fallen world is related to the fact of mortality, which embraces almost everything on our planet, and causes terrible suffering to animals as well as humans. The difference is that, so far as we know, only humans experience this suffering as a form of alienation; we feel somehow as if we belong elsewhere, as if this mortal coil is not something we simply accept, as if our home was from somewhere else.

There is no reason for humans to feel alienated due to the facts of our existence.  Once one understands evolution, the fact that we exist at all should leave humans feeling as if they have won the biggest lottery ever, one that makes the largest Powerball payoff seem like a beggar's breakfast on a bad day. What I hear you saying translates, in the context of my worldview, as something like, "Despite the incredible stroke of luck I have experienced, I want more. Therefore, there must be more." I see no evidence that the sheer fact of one's wanting is a necessary and sufficient condition for there being that which one wants. It seems an incredibly egoistic take on reality.

Another reader:

I think Augustine’s contention, that evil, the absence of the good, has no real existence, deserves more credit. If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, then the opposite of God amounts to nothingness. Evil is parasitic upon the good, and amounts to its corruption/diminution, meaning the good remains (short of cosmic annihilation). The possibility of evil is undoubtedly found in the creation, in its separation from God, but does not make creation evil.

One more:

I couldn't help but think about the children of Lake Wobegon in reading this passage from your response to a reader's point concerning the Theodicy:

My notion of a fallen world is related to the fact of mortality, which embraces almost everything on our planet, and causes terrible suffering to animals as well as humans. The difference is that, so far as we know, only humans experience this suffering as a form of alienation; we feel somehow as if we belong elsewhere, as if this mortal coil is not something we simply accept, as if our home was from somewhere else.

It is a well observed phenomena in psychological research that people, when asked to rate their relative status on any number of personal attributes, consistently over-estimate their positions. That is, in a survey of something like attractiveness or trustworthiness, most of people will rate themselves as above average even though such a distribution is logically impossible. Humans nature is such that we tend to hold very high opinions of ourselves (and often those we love) even in the absence of any evidence that we are particularly exceptional (and often in opposition to considerable evidence that most of us are, in fact, unexceptional). We each are, after all, the only person who really knows what's it like to be ourselves – so it's not as though a little impartiality is unexpected.

The point remains, however, that people are prone to think they always "deserve better" than whatever it is they may have – just watch any reality TV featuring a rich or privileged person to see them voice a frequent awareness of the myriad injustices they must daily face.

So I must ask, how is a person's belief that they "must" be destined for a nobler fate than mere animals anymore significant of deep truth than Paris Hilton's belief that she is inexcusably inconvenienced by being picked up in a chauffeured sedan rather than a stretch limo?

It's likely, given their idyllic town and the strength and beauty of their parents, that the children of Lake Wobegon really do believe they are, every one, above average. Are you inclined to believe them?

These are secular interpretations of an experience of human alienation that my readers at least acknowledge exists. But a religious and spiritual interpretation of this alienation has been the norm in human history and pre-history. You can explain this in any number of ways. It is simply part of the ordeal of consciousness as far as I can see – and no advance in reason will remove its profound endurance in the human soul. And the experience I am describing is not the preference for a fancy limo, but an attempt to live as humans in the face of unspeakable injustice and suffering.

NIAC narrates:

Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani and Seyyed Hassan Khomeini (Imam Khomeini’s grandson) do not want to stand beside Ahmadinejad in the line for the Eid-Al Fitr prayer.

Jonathan Adler points to a gated study that claims in the abstract that the cost of Cash for Clunkers "exceeds the benefit by approximately $2000 per vehicle." More worrying:

The impact of "cash-for-clunkers" was very short-lived. The auto website Edmunds.com is predicting an annualised rate of car sales in September of just 8.8 million units. Not only is that a long way down from the 14 millions plus recorded in August, when the clunkers scheme was in full swing, it was well below the 12.5 million rate recorded in September last year, when the financial system was going to hell in a handcart. The industry got used to an annual sales rate of 16 million.

While defending the National Endowment of the Arts against the latest GOP broadside, Scott Eric Kaufman coins a new word:

*beck v. trans. beck-ing, beck-ed, to be baselessly attacked by an idiot with a megaphone, then have those accusations alter your life for the worse because it’s politically expedient for your spineless superiors to demote or fire you