No, Bush’s critics understood, usually better than his supporters, that Iran had some measure of constitutional and representative government before the Pahlavis, and Turkey has been gradually developing as a democratic republic since WWII. Opponents of the disastrous war and the “freedom agenda” said that democratic and representative government was alien to almost all Arab countries. Lebanon was and remains the exception. That was true. Maliki’s semi-dictatorship in Baghdad does little to change that assessment.
Evan Osnos evaluates the Chinese visit to America:
China has unveiled a sixty-second video titled “Experience China,” the national equivalent of an online-dating ad, projected on a series of whopping screens on Broadway. It will be shown fifteen times an hour, twenty hours a day for the next three weeks. The ad consists of a cycling series of images of China’s big names, including Yao Ming, Internet entrepreneur Robin Li, astronaut Yang Liwei, and pianist Lang Lang. That would be fine, but, regrettably, the images are paired with text that hails “Chinese Bravery,” “Chinese Space Travel,” Chinese Friendship,” and “Chinese Wealth.” At a moment when Americans are talking about little more than job growth, the latter, “Chinese Wealth,” has not been received in the spirit with which its sponsors intended, providing a reminder of how the two sides in this week of dinners and lunches still strain, and fail, to read each other’s emotional temperature.
On Friday, Giffords is expected to leave the hospital for a rehabilitation center. Amy Davidson surveys the remaining physical and emotional wreckage:
Bill Hileman told the Los Angeles Times that his wife, Susan, who was shot that day, has been torturing herself with the idea that “She took a friend’s kid away and didn’t bring her back." Susan had taken Christina to meet her congresswoman because she wanted to encourage her interest in politics. (Bill said that he and Susan, who have two grown children, were “aspiring grandparents.”) She left her hospital bed briefly to see the flowers and notes for the victims that had piled up out front. Another sort of memorial might be for people to take girls to meet their congresswomen and to other political events—both because it’s helpful and to remind Hileman that she did the right thing. For now, though, her husband said, Hileman has been waking up in the hospital screaming Christina’s name, and stray sentences like, “hold my hand—keep your eyes on me, baby.”
It's an established tenet of social psychology that similarities rather than differences—whether in attitude, personality, age, income, race, or religion—produce a lasting relationship. "Opposites tend to attract in the short term, but not in the long-term," says Catherine Sanderson, a psychology professor at Amherst College who teaches a class on close relationships. "Over the long haul, one of the bigger predictors of success in relationships and marriages is similarity."
To help introduce a new "night" formula of Colgate to the French (like we need another variety of fucking toothpaste), Y&R Paris paid some local pizzerias to use these branded boxes. Pizza delivered sitting on a tongue. Scrumpdillyicious.
James Wolcott embalms the old "news vs entertainment" argument:
[E]lite opinion has failed this country so miserably that it has no moral or intellectual standing left, only its club-member privileges. Think back on the Iraq war and the W.M.D.’s, the Terri Schiavo circus, the iguana contortions of John McCain under the guise of maverick integrity, the Wall Street meltdown and bailout—TV satirists and late-night hosts drove much deeper nails into the marrow of what was happening than the editorial pages of The Washington Post, that prison morgue of Beltway consensus. A new political-entertainment class has moved into the noisy void once occupied by the sage pontiffs of yore, a class just as polarized as our partisan divide: one side holding up a fun-house mirror to folly, the other side reveling in its own warped reflection.
Let everyone who opposes abortion, wants to ban GM foods and nuclear energy, hates cars and trucks and planes and loves trains and trolleys, seeks to ban suburbia, despises consumerism, and/or thinks Darwin was a fraud join the Regressive Party. Those of us who believe that the real, if exaggerated, dangers of technology, big government, big business and big labor are outweighed by their benefits can join the Modernist Party. While the Regressives secede from reality and try to build their premodern utopias on their reservations, the Modernists can resume the work of building a secular, technological, prosperous, and relatively egalitarian civilization, after a half-century detour into a Dark Age.
I agree with your reader that “the relationships among Apple, our culture and technology” aren’t unqualified goods. However, as a musician, I can tell you that the iPod is good for more than just “facilitating our personal mirth.” (For now, I’ll decline to dispute the notion that people only listen to music in pursuit of “mirth”.) The ability to put songs on my iPod and listen to them on the way to a gig or recording session has been a huge boon. The iPod’s huge capacity and elegant interface allow me to study an artist’s entire output in any setting, without the need to constantly dig up multiple CDs and shuffle them in and out of a CD player. My iPod is an invaluable tool, not a frivolous diversion.
Another writes:
The rebuttal to your reader's point that the iPhone is no cotton gin was posted on the Dish over a year ago. Patrick's post "The Exobrain Grows More Powerful" highlighted Scott Adams' obvious point that smart phones literally change how we think and store information.
How useful is a smart phone? Let me put it this way. Combine a cellular high-speed data network, a mobile internet browser, and Wikipedia and what do you have? The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's first edition, that's what. Could it be that our inventions have become so powerful that the options they are putting in front of us are so bountiful and terrifying that we don't even know where to begin, so we simply navel gaze?
Another:
While I understand what the reader was trying to say, I think he or she would have been better off leaving "cotton gins" out of their list of the "many positive externalities".
The article lumps together passive screens (televisions) with interactive screens (computers and/or video games). The difference between the two are so endless that any conclusions drawn that combine them are of suspect value. It's certainly possible that interactive screens are still a problem, but the difference in brain activity and social interaction between a TV and the Internet is hard to overstate.
Another writes:
Not to worry, mate. The article says "two or more leisure hours a day sitting in front of a screen"(emphasis mine). I expect you’re off the hook; by your own admission, you don’t have any leisure time.
The Dish 