Month: November 2009

Buzzfeed finds an aurally beautiful but visually gross video of a larynx quartet. (SFW, especially if you work in a dentist's office.)

"[W]orld domination … is the ultimate aim. And they talk about infidels and all this, but the truth is that’s what the game is. So you are dealing with not a religion. You’re dealing with a political system. And I think we should treat it as such and treat its adherences as such as we would members of the Communist Party or members of some fascist group," – Pat Robertson, on Islam.

The original:

And the remix:

(Hat tip: Dan Savage)

A reader writes:

As an acquisitions editor at a dead-tree old-style publishing house, I find your publication plan for the View From Your Window book both commendable and very exciting.  Much of my daily work involves trying to figure out what audience there is for a given book, how many copies we should print (i.e., reasonably expect to sell), and how high or low the price should be given that print run.

I need to keep in mind the expense of warehouse space for copies that don't sell, should I and my colleagues figure wrong.  I need to leave room in the budget for a fair royalty for the author and even more room for profit for my company.  And despite having done my job for over a decade, and despite all the sales figures and spreadsheets that are supposed to help our accuracy in making these sorts of determinations, I often end up guessing wrong–not severely wrong, necessarily, but in publishing even a little wrong can lead to a lot of waste. Some things in this industry are easily predicted, but not many of them, and seemingly fewer all the time.

Your way of doing business here, combining print-on-demand with this crowdsourcing model, is an invigorating one to see unfold.  While it may not yet be as feasible for book projects that don't have a widely read blog behind them, I suspect that in the future, authors and publishers (self- and otherwise) will find other ways of making something like this work.  They will have no other choice.  I told a friend recently that within ten years I expect a computer will be able to do my job, but it might be more likely that I'll be replaced by other people. Thousands of them, millions even, deciding what they want to read and finding, and paying for, the channels that will deliver it to them.

Best wishes and thanks for all the work you do.

Yglesias spins:

The terrorism fears around this subject should also remind us that the fear of a “save haven” in Afghanistan continues to be an underscrutinized concept. Suppose there had been a terrorist plot here? What role would a safe haven have played in it? The key assets Hasan had, from the point of view of committing acts of violence against Americans, were access to weapons and a physical location inside the United States of America.

This is the reality that still haunts me with respect to 9/11. We assume that we have understood that event by now. And I once thought I did. It was a declaration of war and we had to fight back. We went to Afghanistan and removed the Taliban regime; we went to Iraq to prevent al Qaeda getting WMDs and to open up a democratic space where Islamism would falter. I supported both responses.

I worry now, as we peer through the wreckage, that we were simply trying to make our enemy a conventional one, so that we could defeat them by conventional means. Invade a country; change a regime; even use the military for endless attempts at nation-building to "drain the swamp" that brings terror to our cities. We'd beat them that way, wouldn't we? Our power was unrivaled, wasn't it?

So how are we where are we now? In Afghanistan, the Taliban has been empowered by the long occupation and the government is as corrupt as ever and fast losing its own people. Al Qaeda have simply moved to Pakistan where they remain safely as long as they duck drone attacks. In Iraq, we actually gave al Qaeda a new opening and had to spend billions and lose thousands of lives to push them back. Even now, we have no guarantee they will not re-emerge in a still deeply divided country when far fewer American troops will soon remain. And through all this, we threw away one core advantage: our moral high ground. Through torture and the mass killings of civilians, through allowing sectarian genocide in Iraq and giving the world Abu Ghraib and Gitmo as symbols of the new America, we even managed to blur the lines between civilization and barbarism. And in this struggle, our political leaders failed to keep the country united, or the alliance intact.

The awful truth is: what 9/11 revealed, and what it was designed to reveal, is that there is nothing we can really do definitively to stop another one. They had no weapons but our own technology. The training they had was not that sophisticated and the costs of the operation were relatively tiny. There were 19 of them. None of the key perpetrators has been brought to justice. Bin Laden remains at large. If you calculate the costs of that evil attack against the financial, moral and human costs of the fight back, 9/11 was a fantastic demonstration of the power of asymmetry to destroy the West.

Everything that has subsequently transpired has merely deepened that lesson. The US is now bankrupt, trapped in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of our lives, unable even to prevent the two most potentially dangerous Islamist states, Pakistan and Iran, from getting nukes, morally compromised and hanging on to global support only because of a new president who is even now being assaulted viciously at home for such grievous crimes as trying to get more people access to health insurance.

Yes, security is much better. Yes, it's amazing that more attacks have not taken place. Yes, Muslim-Americans have not joined Jihad the way many Europeans have. Yes, we have gained some small benefits from ousting the Taliban, and Saddam … although at terrible costs. But we have done nothing to show that we can really win this war by the methods we have used so far. The biggest blow to al Qaeda as a global brand has not been what we have done to them, but what they have done to themselves, by their flagrant violence against fellow Muslims, their nihilism, and their barbaric brutality.

And now, in the wake of Fort Hood, we face the possibility of radicalizing Muslims in America and polarizing more Americans against them. This does not help. Sure, it is not easy – countering real Islamist danger without provoking more of it. And it is not fair that this monstrous religious terror should exist at all in a free society that did nothing to deserve its attack. But it is what it is. I worry when I read David Brooks this morning:

The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.

Yes and no. Yes, this war is everywhere, because it really exists in the fundamentalist psyche. But we must resist – for those very reasons – the assumption that this is a "struggle against Islam", not Islamism. Maybe this was just a slip of the pen. But how easy it is even for decent smart folk like David to slide into the Manichean world of the fundamentalist, which itself subtly shifts the playing field to the fundamentalists' advantage.

As American politics itself curdles some more into the core divide between fundamentalism and liberalism, the impact of the post-9/11 century deepens. And the murderous marketers of divine certainty make progress – at home and abroad.

(Photo: A man's shadow is shown on a American flag at a victims memorial wall December 11, 2001 near the wreckage of the World Trade Center at Ground Zero in New York. A ceremony December 11 marked the three month anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the Trade Center. More than three thousand people died in the attacks on the twin towers, September 11, 2001. By Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Andrew Exum is not a Seymour Hersh fan:

My theory is that Hersh's journalism is a little like a 12-gauge shotgun. He just lets it go, and something is bound to hit the target. But each year, it seems, another inch is shaved off the barrel, so the shot group gets wider and wider. Over time, fewer and fewer pellets actually hit the target, but such is his reputation that people only remember the articles of his that actually exposed something new and none of the articles that, in retrospect, turned out to be just crazy talk.

Over the weekend, I suggested that we should not be afraid to define those against marriage equality. Dreher counters:

Dropping the "Bigot" Bunker-Buster doesn't seem like a promising strategy to me in a country in which 49 percent of the people think homosexuality is immoral, and in which a Mr. Nice Gay approach is slowly but steadily winning. But we'll see. If that's the way they go, the anti-SSM groups ought to make ads out of this footage of the way an enraged mob of No More Mr. Nice Gays chased peaceful Christians out of the Castro district; the Christians had to be accompanied by police officers for their own safety.

In fact, I was not in any way arguing that we should yell "bigot!" even more loudly. I was suggesting that we keep making the positive constructive case for marriage equality – that it's socially unifying, that it fosters responsibility and family, that it encourages people to look after one another rather than relying on government, that it's humane, that it helps give troubled gay kids hope, that it prevents divorces, and on and on. But in this war, we should not always be the ones on the defensive. We can and should also point out the hypocrisy and history of our opponents.

Is it not somewhat bizarre that the Catholic church, which has perpetrated and covered up abuse, rape and molestation of children on a massive, global scale, should be financing a campaign that says that it is some kind of abuse that gay kids know that they can have a relationship one day like their parents'?

Is it not repulsive that a church like the Mormons, which taught for a majority of its existence that African-Americans were marked as damned by God and that no black person could be a Mormon, should now be a chief financier of a campaign to deny another minority civil rights? Are we not entitled to illuminate just how rotten these institutions are on these questions of children and civil rights? Are we not entitled to insist that the use of church funds to run clear political campaigns against minorities should result in an end to their tax-exempt status?

As for that "mob", it was a handful of Christianists who, not content with using democratic means to strip their fellow citizens of civil rights, decided to celebrate their victory by haranguing gay people as the bars closed in Castro Street the weekend after Prop 8. Please.

I would like to ask Rod if the gay mobs he feared would be showing up at his doorstep ever actually showed up. Or whether his own terror of homosexual orientation might have warped his grip on reality?

A reader writes:

The reader who wrote that the children shouldn't be surprised by their parents' arrival home because it adds on more time to their worrying is off base. When my son came home on leave and then permanently from Afghanistan we did not know when his exact date of arrival would be. We were given a window in which to expect him. He called me one day to say his leave would begin sometime in the next two weeks and it would take up to a week to get home. I heard from him 12 days later to let me know he was in Dallas and would land in Houston in about 3 hours.

Same thing when he was due home for good. Just got a call one evening saying he had landed at Ft. Bragg and was safe. I knew he was supposed to be home somewhere in the 30 day window but no idea when.

Waiting for that window is a hard, hard thing. You don't know if they are truly coming. Or if something has happened and they canceled leaves. Or something happened to them along the way.  It is nerve wracking and my husband and I had many sleepless nights waiting for "the window". I imagine many spouses here in the states are not telling their children that mommy or daddy is coming home because they don't want to visit this prolonged waiting and worrying upon them. Leave the spouses alone. They are making the best decisions they can in a bad situation.

Another writes:

I've been on many deployments during my career in the Navy and as strange as it might sound to a civilian, they become routine after awhile. The only homecoming my family ever talks about is the one where I walked in the front door a week early, and that includes the homecoming after spending a year in Iraq. If I had called from the airport in Europe to tell everyone Dad was on his way home, that homecoming would have been lost with all the others. It's not about putting it on youtube, it's about making coming home more special than it already is.

Watch and weep through your laughter: