Month: May 2010

This is the first time since high school I’ve watched a guide to CPR all the way through:

Super Sexy CPR from Super Sexy CPR on Vimeo.

Jonathan Bernstein:

The elephant in the room that Beinart doesn't discuss is that Israeli leaders may feel that they don't need Jewish support in the United States, because they can substitute Christian evangelical support, with the latter less likely (or at least perceived to be less likely) to produce any sorts of constraints on the Israeli government. Personally, I think shifting from a American base of American Jews to a coalition of Orthodox Jews, evangelical Christians, and ideological neo-cons would be a tragic mistake for Israel…but I can certainly understand the appeal for Likud politicians. 

Yglesias:

in many ways Israel is on net benefitting from a rising tide of anti-Islamic sentiment in the western world even as its support on the American left is eroding. New anti-Muslim European political parties like Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party and the Danish People’s Party are among the most pro-Israel groupings on the continent even though in some respects they’re actually the descendants of the European anti-semitic movements of yore. We don’t have growing far-right parties in the United States, but in part that’s because violent populist nationalism with an anti-Islamic tinge is part of our mainstream conservative movement. Ultimately, these may just be the kind of friends that Israeli political elites want to have.

Ezra Klein:

I don't know where this ends. As Beinart says, one possibility is that the ranks of American Zionists cease to be dominated by mainstream Jews and instead become the province of Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christian Zionists and takes a sharp turn toward the right even as its influence ebbs. Another possibility is that this will prove the darkness before the dawn of a more reasonable turn in Israeli politics. A scarier possibility is that some sort of catastrophic event — either a terrible attack on Israel, or a terrible attack by Israel — reshapes the situation.

But Israel has to walk with care. Previous generations might have believed in "Israel, right or wrong." Their replacements may not be as willing to sacrifice moral perspective in service of tribal allegiance.

And this is where Palin comes in. She is a settler-fanatic. She wants more Jewish immigration into the West Bank. She wears a twinned US and Israel flag pin for the Tea-Party convention. She is AIPAC's last hope for denialism and a Manichean struggle in which the most atavistic feelings emerge and prevent, actual thinking. I see Palin's fundamentalist belligerence as a non-starter for the West. But it would be a catastrophe for Israel. As a reader notes:

I'm currently reading Birds Without Wings, a novel by Louis de Bernières about the last days of the Ottoman Empire. Last night I felt very squeamish about a Palin candidacy after reading this sentence:

"The triple contagions of nationalism, utopianism and religious absolutism effervesce together into an acid that corrodes the moral metal of a race, and it shamelessly and even proudly performs deeds that it would deem vile if they were done by any other."

Torture, anyone?

Chait charges that "to appeal to conservatives who don't share his beliefs about public policy, [David Frum] often frames his case" as a crass electoral calculation. Chait continues, noting that Frum predicted before the 2008 elections that Republicans would lose seats in 2010. He warns that Frum is "staking his case on electoral predictions that won't necessarily come true, which will make him easier to ignore." Frum replies:

[T]he trend lines were clear in 2008 and will emerge again as the economy recovers: a party that does not offer practical solutions to workaday problems – that builds itself on a narrow social and ethnic base – and that is more excited by protest than by governance – will not be a success in either political or policy terms.

This challenge will not be dispelled by large Republican gains in 2010. It could even become more difficult, if Republicans draw the wrong lessons from a big success. And that’s one prediction that cannot be gainsaid.

TNC posits:

I think New Yorkers only seem more smug, because there are more people in New York and thus more arrogant New Yorkers. In my time, I have watched mo-fos from everywhere from Dallas to Cleveland to Columbia, Maryland hold forth about why their neck of the woods is touched by God. This kind of person would be that way, no matter where he or she were born. Regrettably, in New York we have more of those kinds of people, because we have more of all kinds of people. It's worth remembering the sheer population size of the city–it's like ten Detroits. 

Ezra agrees. He adds:

[New Yorkers] have what's considered the greatest city in the country and can't stop talking about it. It's like an A-student bragging about his grades, or a rich guy making everybody look at his car. It's unseemly.

Martin Schneider is offended:

[C]onfronted with presumably countless examples of snobbish New Yorkers disparaging Indianapolis, Tulsa, Atlanta, or Baltimore, Klein, Coates, and Sullivan couldn't be bothered to name a single instance of anybody doing this. In this discussion, that was taken as a given, just as in a book you don't have to cite anyone to establish that Amsterdam is north of Rome. It is a truth just as self-evident, apparently.

This gets all the more astonishing if you contemplate analogous scenarios. Imagine if any of these men had endeavored to make some point about, say, Mexican-Americans in the same manner. Ahh, "Mexican-Americans are fine people and work hard, but they obsess too much about soccer and they have no interest in education," let's say. Do you think any of them would venture such a statement without casting about for some empirical evidence that what they were saying is true?

A scene from the weekly protest at An Nabi Saleh, a Palestinian village in the West Bank. It's a tiny village, with only 500 or so residents, but is now flanked by an illegal Israeli settlement. Wikipedia:

Near the village the is a natural spring named Ein Al Kus ("the Bow Spring"). In 2009 settlers from the nearby settlement of Halamish took control over the spring and its surroundings while preventing Palestinian access to it. Subsequently, people of Nabi Salih and the nearby village of Dir Nizam began regular Friday protests for the spring which they claim as their own, and against the Israeli occupation in general.

Some also say that some olive trees were taken. An account of a previous clash in which several were injured is here. But what you can see more generally is what Israel has to do in the face of these settlers' provocations: they have to arrest and mistreat peaceful protesters and they have to shoot live ammunition to keep villagers at bay. This is the trap Israel is in, the trap that is getting tighter and more lethal by the day.

Lexington praises America's hinterland:

My column this week is about America's wide open spaces. I argue that America's colossal land mass is a big advantage, since it means the country can absorb vast numbers of immigrants (and new babies) without feeling crowded. I also look at how the internet is boosting remote places. It makes it easier to find out about them (people shop around online for places to live, and once you start comparing house prices and crime rates, places like Boise start to look very attractive). The internet also makes it easier to find interesting work in the boondocks. A broadband connection gives you nearly the same access to information as someone in New York or the Bay Area has.

Andrew Rice looks into the growing trend of online media companies crafting their content around the top search queries of the day:

There is, of course, nothing wrong with giving readers what they secretly want every once in a while. The problem arises when you start producing articles solely for the id of the search engines, because some clicks are more valuable than others.

The Dish has recently shifted its focus away from pageviews.

Steinglass defends his belief that bloggers “have an incentive to condemn and satirize in all political directions so as to maintain their claim to ideological independence”. He illustrates his point:

I think one of the best examples of the risk one avoids through the easy out of constant cynical is the problem Sullivan has in his treatment of Barack Obama.

I’m actually with Sullivan on this: Barack Obama is an enormously talented politician and a deeply ethical guy, with a complex and sophisticated view of how politics works and of how to be responsible in trying to strengthen the polity and improve people’s lives through the messy medium of politics. I give him an enormous benefit of the doubt in almost any situation, both in terms of his intentions and in terms of whether his take on an issue is better than mine. This is true of Sullivan as well. But the risk Sullivan has run in his very admiring writing on Obama is that many readers will come to see him as a cheerleader.

I don’t think this is fair, and I think that even if it’s true, that’s a problem those readers have, not a problem Sullivan has. But still, this is a risk that exists in the journalistic world. The same thing happened to Hendrik Hertzberg during the administration of another extremely talented and admirable president, Bill Clinton. It would be easy for Sullivan to avoid this risk by simply adopting a world-weary skeptical attitude towards Obama, and it’s to his credit that he’s not doing so.

But I hope it’s also clear that I will not hesitate to criticize when I think it’s due – on Afghanistan, Bagram, the packaging of Kagan, DADT, etc. But I remain of the view that we are indeed lucky to have Obama as president right now.

A reader writes:

The notion that a wave is made of water is, I believe, a false one. A wave is a pulse of energy that propagates through water. If you place a piece of wood in the water and watch it float as waves go by, you will notice that the wood is pushed forward as the wave approaches, then is pulled back as the wave moves on, and in the end, the wood remains in much the same place as it started (this does assume that there is no current in the water. Currents and waves are different things). Similarly, sound is a wave that propagates through air, the same way, just different media. Claiming that a wave is made of water is like claiming that sound is made of air. The difference is that we have a sense that is designed to bring sound into our consciousness so we can process it. We have no sense for waves in the ocean, other than looking at them.

Understanding this difference is, I think, critical to understanding spirituality. It’s not just an academic exercise.

We have no sense that can process and clearly understand spirituality – God, Budda, whatever you call it. Therefore, spirituality is a mystery. The best we can do is look in awe at the mystery. But that makes it hard for us to discuss spirituality with each other, so we create metaphors to help us talk about what we feel inside.

The wave is a metaphor. Creating a metaphor does two contradictory things at the same time. First, it gives us a common framework in which we can discuss spirituality with each other, which allows us to get closer to the mystery. Second, it cements in our minds a method of thinking that is man-made, not spiritual, which prevents us from getting closer to the mystery.

The quote for the day is one of the clearest examples I have seen of a metaphor that speaks of things we can understand, but hinders us from closer understanding of our own spirituality.