Month: October 2009

A reader writes:

When we were deep in Iraq—say, 2007—there were a lot of folks trying to draw an analogy to Vietnam. I was never particularly comfortable with that one; it didn’t seem apt. But in Afghanistan, it seems *completely* apt. Mountains instead of jungles, but the same unrest in the population; the same difficulties in having a standing fight in which U.S. Military superiority works to our advantage; the same prospect of basically endless war. So what I’m wondering is, if we just up and leave, what’s the problem? Al Qaeda? No; if they are “forced out” of Afghanistan, they’ll just decamp to Pakistan. Or Uzbekhistan, or Syria, or basically anyplace else.

They’re not an army or militia; they’re a terrorist group. We can’t simultaneously force them out of all the countries on Earth; this is not a military operation. They may have laughed at Kerry in 2004 when he pointed that out, but he was right. The sooner our fearless leaders recognize that and pull our chestnuts out of that fire, the better off we’ll be.

Hubris is one of the signs of Imperial collapse. Don’t any of these clowns read history?

Actress Lindsay Lohan at Beverly Hills Municipal Court on October 16, 2009 in Beverly Hills, California. By Nick Ut-Pool/Getty Images.

Sometimes the shrill accusations of being a leftist turncoat rattle me a little. And then I realize I'm not alone:

Increasingly, British Tories wonder what has happened to their American relatives. It’s as if your favorite cousin had a nervous breakdown, found religion, and became an evangelist for an apocalyptic cult prophesying the imminent end of the world as we know and love it.

The scale of this trans-Atlantic distancing was revealed by a survey last year that found that 48 percent of prospective Tory MPs supported Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Tellingly, the Republicans invited to speak at Conservative Party conferences in recent years—Arnold Schwarzenegger and John McCain—are the kind most despised by many grassroots conservatives in the United States.

Beck’s brand of conservatism could scarcely be more alien to a Brit. Its startling popularity in the United States would once have been an underground phenomenon; now, thanks to satellite television, the issues and attitudes that animate the conservative base can be seen, in all their gruesome glory, across the world.

Alcohol doesn't take full effect until long after it is ingested. A study tests whether inexperienced drinkers have a hard time gauging how much alcohol is too much. Yep:

[T]he folk advice to never go out drinking on an empty stomach may not be so wise after all. It's sensible for people who intend to drink a fixed amount but not for people intending to drink until they reach a desired level of inebriation. "Here we show that it may not be sound advice for inexperienced juveniles that drink according to a simple feedback strategy," the researchers said. "Drinking on a full stomach massively extends the stomach delay, thereby making it much harder to manage one's blood alcohol level."

Julian Sanchez tackles that Washington Times editorial from this morning:

[W]hat’s really baffling is that it’s never quite made clear what the authors find problematic about the rather anodyne goal of promoting tolerance and civility between students. Given that actual kids in actual schools do bully and harass kids who don’t fit gender stereotypes, or who come from nontraditional families, what does the Times regard as an acceptable approach by the schools? They’re supposed to stand by in silence, for fear that they might “indoctrinate” someone with the radical communist view that it’s unacceptable to use “gay” and “faggot” as terms of abuse?

Or perhaps they should just ban the word “gay” without explanation, as though it’s some kind of profanity, or an especially heinous thing to accuse someone of? It seems to me you’ve got to be awfully dense not to get that there’s also an implicit lesson when schools casually and routinely reference hetero relationships, while gay and lesbian couples—who, like, go to supermarkets and have kids in little league and stuff; students are going to notice they exist—are under some kind of omerta, never to be mentioned. Is the conservative position now that schools are supposed to remain indifferent to harassment in their halls, or to treat the families of certain students as a shameful secret?  Because that appears to be the alternative.

P. Z. Myers points to a video of a dog running through traffic to try to save another dog that had been hit. He says:

Keep this in mind when you encounter people — yeah, I'm looking at you, Francis Collins — try to argue that morality and altruism and empathy are unique markers of a divine hand in our origin.

Greg Mayer adds:

[W]e’ve long known that dogs have rudimentary moral sentiments, and Darwin included observations of his dogs (the second of which was named Bob) in his writings on the subject (see  here, especially chap. 3, and here both links are to The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online).  A sample (Descent, vol. 1, p. 77):

I have myself seen a dog, who never passed a great friend of his, a cat which lay sick in a basket, with-out giving her a few licks with his tongue, the surest sign of kind feeling in a dog.

PZ needs to chill out. Saint Francis knew this a long time ago. There is a divine marker in all living creatures.

Fred Kaplan looks behind the headlines:

Fewer people joined the Army this year than last year. The Army exceeded its recruitment goals not because recruitment went up but rather because recruitment goals were lowered. The Army is the service that has been having the hardest time finding new recruits in recent years, in part because it has borne the heaviest burden—and suffered by far the most casualties—in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Brian Doherty highlights an important but often overlooked law:

The Brennan Center for Justice files a FOIA suit to try to get the government to acknowledge that even its own Office of Legal Counsel knew that one of its absurd demands is unconstitutional: the demand that any organization receiving federal funds related to AIDS work pledge that it has "a policy explictly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking."

In her recent book, The Wisdom Of Whores, Elizabeth Pisani describes the problem with this law thus:

The loyalty oath is based on the belief, no, the absolute conviction, that anything that improves work conditions for prostitutes serves only to bind them into slavery. The High Priestess of this view is a US academic named Donna Hughes, who pontificates on the evils of commercial sex from every available pulpit. In an op-ed piece titled 'Aiding and Abetting the Slave Trade', she railed at a programme that taught Cambodian sex workers to negotiate condom use with their clients. The programme was part of a national effort that sent new HIV infections in Cambodia crashing to fewer than 6,000 a year by 2005, from over 42,000 a decade earlier. But it was wicked.

Much more on this an other HIV-related topics in her excellent book. Her blog is here.

Martine van Bijlert, co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, hears rumors:

The whole prospect of a possible second round is seen by many Afghans not so much as the outcome of an investigative statistical process, but rather as a means to force a preferred outcome — whatever that may be. And so it seems that the Karzai camp is calling Abdullah’s (and the international community's) bluff. You want a second round, you can have one — very much in the same way as Karzai caught the opposition off guard earlier this spring when he suddenly gave them what they wanted: an election date within the Constitutionally prescribed deadline (but logistically impossible and politically impractical).

The whole post is well worth reading.

The following lip dub was obviously inspired by our Hathos Alert this week:

Kinda reminds me of a Dish staff meeting.