Month: September 2009

A reader writes:

The parallel to England is eerier than you acknowledge. In both cases, the underlying driver is a religious reformation. Europe's Reformation was led by thoroughly modern leaders, determined to return to religious fundamentals and to purge the faith of the accreted mass of folkloric and pagan practices. It was also an attack on traditional structures of authority and hierarchies. In place of a large number of deeply-local, culturally specific Christianities, the Reformation proposed a universal faith in which every believer had equal recourse to the scripture, the ultimate source of authority. No intermediation. (Of course, the ironic effect of such universalizing beliefs was to fragment Christiandom into a host of warring denominations, each claiming adherents across traditional social and geographic lines.) It took time – and a shocking amount of bloodshed – before new, stable societies were able to emerge from the chaos.

Compare that to the Islamic world, which is experiencing its own reformation. The young, in particular, are drawn to more universal versions of Islam. In immigrant communities and in urban enclaves, they tend to be embarrassed by the clergy imported from their native lands or from the countryside, who are relatively poorly educated and adhere to practices that are more cultural than religious. They turn instead to preachers offering what seems a purer faith, more closely grounded in Islamic texts.

This is why the West has found itself in the curious position of allying itself with older, tribal authorities against insurgents in Iraq, who are attacking both the West and traditional social

arrangements.

It's why the terror attacks in Western nations tend to be perpetrated by those for whom the contrast seems sharpest – young people fully embedded in modern life, drawn to a faith which radically rejects many traditional practices in the name of a purer, reconstructed tradition. They seek the same intellectual rigor in their religious observance that marks their professional lives, and the syncretic practices of their birthplaces seem backward and anachronistic. And, even more radically, they claim the right to seek out and select which religious authorities they will follow.

This suggests the somewhat-depressing conclusion that the shift in the meaning of Islam is going to have to play itself out internally before any measure of stability is restored. Moments of revolutionary change are seldom susceptible to outside interventions in the name of stability. Revolutionary movements that seize power eventually spend themselves, and tend to ossify into regimes that bear a startling resemblance to those they replaced – witness Russia, Iran, or even England's Protectorate. But to imagine, for example, that simply bolstering the old tribal structures can hold back the flood-tide is to place ourselves on the wrong side of history.

Who's right about the long-term costs of the current proposals – the CBO or the Institute of Medicine?

Barry Delaney kneels weeping as mourners gather at Barnhill Cenetery for the funeral of Black Watch soldier Kevin Elliot on September 15, 2009 in Dundee, Scotland. Private Elliot was killed during a rocket attack in the Babaji district of Helmand in Afghanistan. Delaney wagered Kevin Elliot that they would wear this lime-green dress to either's funeral. By Jeff J Mitchell/Getty.

Megan responds here. A reader retorts:

Pace McArdle, health reform is nothing like Medicare Part D. Medicare Part D is available to all beneficiaries regardless of income. The subsidies provided in the reform bills scale with income and are in place to make workable a mandate that will, by itself, lower the average cost of individual care relative to current law. Additionally, health subsidies are fully funded for 10 years according to stingy estimates by the CBO (that don't jive with reform advocates' predictions of how reform will bend the cost curve). On top of that, Obama's now pledged that deficit neutrality will be written into the bill; finding new funding or modifying the program would require Congressional action in the future. There is simply no comparison between Medicare Part D and

health reform.

I think you're being far too kind to her commentary. In fact, the CBO scoring of the HELP bill, which has the most generous subsidies proposed at 400% of the federal poverty line shows total subsidies costing $140B/yr 10 years from now. Medicare Part D is expected to hit that mark a year earlier according to Kaiser's projections … and, you know, Congress is actually going to fund health subsidies by fining employers that don't providing insurance, etc.

Along with anti-gay pogroms, torture is making a comeback:

Muntader al-Zaidi said that when he was arrested after hurling his shoes at Mr. Bush at a December news conference, those inside could probably still hear his screams. He said he was shackled, soaked in water and kept in a place with no heat in the cold night. “I will name later those involved in torturing me, among them high-ranking officials in the government and the Army,” he said. He claimed that he was beaten with pipes and steel cables and that he received electric shocks while in custody.

The Economist reports on the slow migration of al-Maliki toward the techniques of Saddam:

Torture is routine in government detention centres.

“Things are bad and getting worse, even by regional standards,” says Samer Muscati, who works for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby. His outfit reports that, with American oversight gone (albeit that the Americans committed their own shameful abuses in such places as Abu Ghraib prison), Iraqi police and security people are again pulling out fingernails and beating detainees, even those who have already made confessions. A limping former prison inmate tells how he realised, after a bout of torture in a government ministry that lasted for five days, that he had been relatively lucky. When he was reunited with fellow prisoners, he said he saw that many had lost limbs and organs.

Yglesias graphs data from that latest WaPo poll.

Jacob Sullum parses the new drug arrest numbers. He reminds us:

As I noted in the January 2008 issue of Reason, there is no obvious relationship between marijuana arrests and marijuana use: Increases in arrests do not seem to be driven by increases in consumption, and busting more pot smokers does not seem to result in less pot smoking. While the odds of getting arrested have roughly doubled since the early 1990s, the overall of level of use is no lower now than it was then and may be somewhat higher (changes in survey methodology make it difficult to be sure). In the last several years, self-reported marijuana use has been essentially flat, while arrests continued to climb before dropping slightly last year, when survey data indicate that use rose slightly.

Mark Jacobson has an excellent piece on New York's schizophrenia on the subject here. The contradictions keep heightening.

A tad preachy at the end, but pretty cool:

Bottled Water, photographs by James Worrell from James Worrell on Vimeo.

The cops keep changing their story.

Matt Steinglass differs with Conor Friedersdorf over how to interpret the Thatcher news from last week:

I don’t think the revelations should lead one to mistrust politicians in quite the way Friedersdorf does. It’s true that politicians’ most simplistic public statements and slogans will not always be adhered to in the details of their diplomatic maneuvering. But I don’t actually think Margaret Thatcher thought it was okay for Communism to persist indefinitely in Eastern Europe. It’s just that she also didn’t really think the Soviet Union was a rabid totalitarian dictatorship bent on invading Western Europe, and whose leaders could never be trusted; and apparently, in late 1989, she thought there was more risk in a sudden collapse of Communism, with Eastern European countries ripping away from the Soviet orbit, than in a slower evolutionary transition. Her public political pronouncements were a camera-friendly, lowest-common-denominator version of her somewhat more sophisticated actual anti-Communism. And the same was true of George H.W. Bush. Both were capable of tempering their ideological preferences with a healthy dose of realism.

But Thatcher was utterly wrong about Germany – and fueled by paranoia. She was a pragmatist, as Reagan was (and Bush wasn't), and, in my view, she single-handedly rescued Britain from terminal decline. But she blew this one big. It was her foreign policy poll tax. And it was party why her colleagues decided she had to be pushed out of power.