Month: January 2011

Gaby Calvocoressi interviewed Reza Aslan on his new anthology Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East:

You need the arts—literature, music, film—as a universal language that allows people to see beyond the walls that separate us. To stop thinking of each other as different religions, or different cultures, or different ethnicities, or nationalities, and start thinking of each other as human beings. As people with the same aspirations, and the same dreams, the same conflicts and the same issues. It’s only through that recognition of same-ness that you really do change people’s minds. …

[H]ere is this guy trying to be a poet in Iran and that from thousands and thousands of miles away I was able to read these poems [on the Internet] and pull them out and put them in a book and now thousands of other people are going to be reading it and it’s getting back to him now and he’s thinking “Is there some way I can use this to come to America and share more of my poems,” etc. That’s what we mean by borderless.

 

A man smokes in front of the Mirafiori Fiat plant in Turin on January 14, 2011. The 5,500 workers at Turin's Mirafiori plant will be employed under a joint Fiat-Chrysler venture and as such will no longer have the standard national industry contract, judged to be too restrictive by Fiat. A referendum on the deal, which has sparked a heated debate in Italy, is due to take place at the plant on January 13-14, 2011. By Olivier Morin/Getty.

Vaughan Bell contemplates the reworking of the manual for mental illness:

My only gripe with the [Wired] article is it seems a little star-struck by the idea that mental illness could be validated or even wholly defined by reference to neuroscience, which is a huge category error. … That’s not to say that neuroscience isn’t important, essential even, but we can’t define disability purely on a biological basis. It would be like trying to define poverty purely on how much money you had, without reference to quality of life. We need to know what different amounts of money can do for the people in their real-life situations. Earning $5 a day is not the same in New York and Papua New Guinea.

And Jon Stewart is off to the races.

It's important to push back against untruths as much as against incivility. And so when Christopher Caldwell writes the following in the Financial Times, I have to to ask him for actual evidence:

Many prominent people disheartened by the resurgence of the Republican party – notably the blogger Andrew Sullivan, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and the Pima County sheriff Clarence Dupnik – linked the shootings to Republican ideology or rhetoric, as expressed by former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin or the Tea Party movement or certain talk-show hosts.

Everything I wrote in real time can be read here, and so I challenge Chris to back up his statement. I air as much information and background as it comes in, and that includes the violent context of the last election and Giffords' prescient warning about gun sights imagery (that's my job), but my first actual venture as to the motive for this shooting is the following ambivalence:

Let's just say for one moment: this is so awful that political grandstanding seems both inappropriate right now, and yet also very appropriate. An attempted political assassination is a political act and deserves a political response. We cannot wish this side of the question away. We do not yet know the motives for this excrescence. But they matter.

An hour later, the first evidence from Loughner:

Peter Pan, Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto. Not exactly a Tea Party purist. But clearly disturbed.

My first impulse in any assassination of a political leader is to ask about possible political motivation, as well as the possibility of none. But my first personal judgment of any link between Loughner and the Tea Party is to debunk it (I still wonder what his currency crazy is about, but we'll find out at some point, I guess). Then:

His [MySpace Page] seems just plain nuts to me rather than Tea Partyish.

Compare this with Krugman with whom Chris lumps me:

We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was.

Where did I ever make that leap? I left the question open, and then leaned toward the mental illness explanation as "a key part" of this. Then:

So far, the content reveals a character not far from this reader's diagnosis: "This guy is a sui generis nut…no evidence that I can see of Tea Party influence. His concerns are to create his own reality." … It seems to me so far that he appears a disturbed and dangerous individual able to absorb shards of political conspiracy theories and turn them into evil.

At the end of my live-blogging, I conclude with Andrew Sprung's statement:

It appears to me that this unfortunate insane individual is of no party or clique.

Did I explore the issue of far right violence after Giffords' father cited the Tea Party? You bet I did. How could I not? Did I ever "link the shootings to Republican ideology or rhetoric"? Nope. Do I think such rhetoric is over the top in a world where crazy people have access to guns? Yes. Do I agree with Giffords that Palin's imagery was dangerous? Yes. But as for the motive of Loughner, by the time 6.32 pm comes along, I have concluded that this was likely a psychotic breakdown, and cited a psychiatrist to that effect, and specifically ended with the case that he is "of no party". How can I be accused of linking Loughner to the GOP when I specifically cite that he seems to be "of no party"?

The Financial Times needs to run a correction.

The murderer's video that got him suspended from school. Creepy beyond measure.

Liz Dwyer reports:

According to the annual study of America's Most Literate Cities, Washington, D.C., has snatched the literacy crown away from perennial front runner, Seattle. Unfortunately, a closer look at the numbers reveals that nationally, key indicators of literacy are on the decline. The scores that earned D.C. the top spot in 2010 would, in 2004, only be enough to reach 7th place.

Cathleen Kaveny weighs in on Drum's offer of a coin toss for radically more or less money:

When you’re talking about income level, you’re talking about the material matrix around which people create a life and identity.  … That doesn’t say that people don’t get attached to things they shouldn’t, or that materialism isn’t a problem.  But it is a problem because of the attachment–and de-attaching from anything is harder than not attaching in the first place.

Andreas Markessinis mulls Southern Sudan's naming dilemma:

One possible option is ‘New Sudan’, but some oppose the idea as that name would associate the new country with the actual Sudan, which is considered a pariah state. For a weak, new country with weak influence, getting the world population to distinguish between ‘Sudan’ and ‘New Sudan’ would take aeons. Many people still confuse South Korea with North Korea and don’t remember which one is the rogue state, so any combination of names including the word ‘Sudan’ will probably be counter-productive to the new country, nationals say. …

Others prefer the Nile Republic, arguing that this name would put the country on the map and build an attractive image around a world-famous asset, the Nile river. But, as in the Greece-FYROM name dispute, tensions with Egypt, which considers itself the guardian of the ‘Nile brand’, could appear if the new country chose to name itself so.