Reihan Salam argues that Al Gore's brand of environmentalism paves over genuine concerns about green policies:
Like Al Gore, I believe that anthropogenic climate change is real and that it poses a serious threat to the future of humanity. But I also recognize that transitioning from carbon-based energy will be painful. As small and mid-sized coal-fired power plants shut down across the United States in response to new environmental regulations, the costs of replacing that capacity will be front-loaded. Utility rates will rise considerably, particularly in coal-dependent battleground states like Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Missouri. There’s a good case that this is a price worth paying. And perhaps there is somehow some way to guarantee that middle-class families won’t bear the brunt of this transition. Perhaps the rich won’t spend or invest less if they are called upon to pay for it. Who knows? But it is easy to see why middle-class voters might be skeptical.
Walter Russell Mead, meanwhile, attacks Gore for his carbon-heavy lifestyle:
I am not one of those who thinks him a hypocrite; I think rather that he shares an illusion common amongst the narcissistic glitterati of our time: that politically fashionable virtue cancels private vice. The drug addled Hollywood celeb whose personal life is a long record of broken promises and failed relationships and whose serial bouts with drug and alcohol abuse and revolving door rehab adventures are notorious can redeem all by “standing up” for some exotic, stylish cause. These moral poseurs and dilettantes of virtue are modern versions of those guilt-plagued medieval nobles who built churches and monasteries to ‘atone’ for their careers of bloodshed, oppression and scandal.
I get really bored by these personal attacks, especially when they serve to dismiss rather than engage the broader issue.
Simon Winchester trades in his UK citizenship to become an American:
I began to consider what truly mattered to me, about the society in which I wanted to live out the rest of my days. I used to stroll at lunchtime down to the waterfront, at the Battery, and list those attributes of Home I felt I could abandon. Though at first I felt a traitor, a heretic, I realized I would feel no qualms at all about turning my back on the notions of royalty, on the bizarre idea of an established church, on inherited privilege, on the House of Lords, on class divisions, and on the relative want of opportunity. It was this last that pushed me over the edge. By now I was prospering, and in a way and to a degree that I felt I could never have done back home. I felt so deeply grateful to America in consequence, beholden.
I feel much the same way, but I am at a moment when I am about to go back to England for a period with my family and old friends and see the country that I grew up in as a more distant adult, since I was kept from visiting it by the HIV ban for a long time. Memories will doubtless flood back. But in some ways, it is all a prelude to arriving back in the States for the first time as a Green Card holder and being told, politely, "Welcome Home."
Dexter Filkins has his doubts about withdrawing from Afghanistan:
The country remains riddled with violence, and negotiations with the Taliban—a last-resort option—have led nowhere. It is not hard to imagine a repeat of the Afghan civil war, which engulfed the country after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union, and which ultimately gave rise to the Taliban. Bloodied but unbroken, the Taliban hardly seem like an army preparing to beg for peace. Their leaders greeted Obama’s words with a swift promise: “Our armed struggle will increase.”
What [Filkins] seemingly cannot do, even now, is admit that the correct response to two years of a failed strategy is not to “tough it out,” as Michael O’Hanlon would put it, but to consolidate our losses and withdraw.
The Pentagon has paid more than $14 billion in contracts for fuel in the Middle East. Aram Roston asks whether "U.S. taxpayer dollars [are] enriching the ruling potentates of friendly regimes just as the youthful protesters and the Arab Spring have brought a new push for democracy across the region?":
Consider Kuwait, where Arifjan, the major U.S. base, serves as the chief military supply route to Iraq. Like the Al Nahyan family in Abu Dhabi, the al-Sabah clan runs Kuwait, as well as its national oil concern, Kuwait Petroleum Co., which has received some $4 billion in Pentagon contracts since 2005, much of it in sole-source contracts.
(Photo: The tarmac at the Al Dhafra military base in the United Arab Emirates. By Witt-Sipa /AP)
Republican elites have long had to learn not to snicker out loud at some of the religious views of their Christian Right allies. This is probably why they chose to attack Mike Huckabee in 2008 on the basis of his heterodox economic policy sentiments rather than his theocratic leanings. Perhaps, then, they will find another angle to go after Bachmann, such as her occasionally isolationist-sounding foreign policy views. But the bottom line is that Bachmann’s moment in the sun makes her vulnerable to attacks that are being formulated as we speak, and we’ll know soon enough who takes the lead in cutting her down to size, and whether it actually works.
The Taliban just attacked a major international hotel in the Afghan capital – a rare move for the mostly provincial insurgency. Uri Friedman is live-blogging:
3:30 – As we wait for updates, we're getting some background on the hotel and why the attack is significant. Journalist Matthieu Aikins notes that the hotel, which sits on a hill in western Kabul, is a "haunt of expats and Afghan elite" while Najafizada adds that provincial governors were staying in the hotel in recent days for a conference. A guest tells the AP that the attack began when many people were having dinner in the hotel's restaurant, and that he'd heard gunfire throughout the building. "This was a well planned attack," writes the BBC's Bilal Sarwary. "Terrorists change of tactic, attack during night, surprised everyone." Najafizada, meanwhile, is still hearing machine gun fire despite reports that the situation is under control.
Some 24% of Israelis are non-Jews. About 20% are either Muslim or Christian; some 4% are people who identity as officially vague – they are not Palestinians, but the rabbinate, which in Israel largely determines such matters, refuses to acknowledge them as Jews.
Does J. L. Wall consider those non-Jews "family", too? Or does he think of Israel as merely its Jewish community? One in four Israelis is not a Jew. All of them suffer, to a degree, from social exclusion – Muslims and Arab Christians, of course, suffering more than others. This is why the Palestinians, and progressive Israelis, refuse Netanyahu's demand that Israel will be recognized as a Jewish state: This will supply a de jure justification to the politics of discrimination Israel indulges in for some sixty years.
The fact that American Jews, for the most part, are unaware of these issues, shows they are not really in love with Israel: They are in love with a vague notion of it, a phantasm of a family. They simply cannot see how dysfunctional that family is.
It seems to me that the debate between spiritualist and scientific interpretations of the psilocybin experience depends on a false alternative. It’s true that a scientific perspective rules out witnessing supernatural facts. But that’s not the same as ruling out witnessing spiritual facts, at least not in the sense that most people mean by the word “spiritual”.
It is entirely compatible with what science has revealed about the world that human individuals bear a profound kinship to other parts of the universe, a kinship that ought to have tremendous value. The common misconception that science – unlike the Medieval world-view it replaced – implies our alienation from the world – our being strangers in a valueless world indifferent to our fates – ignores what science has shown. Darwin’s theory, for example, shows the profound connections that all creatures, including human beings, bear to each other. We learn about our own bodies by studying the genes of house flies!
If contemporary science is right, we are parts of the universe in a more profound way than most religious traditions have ever suspected. Furthermore, we play a very special role in the universe: we (as well as other sapient species, if there are any) are the universe becoming conscious of itself – matter coming to the realization of its own existence, both the fact of it and its nature.
The realization of our connectedness with and kinship to everything is a deeply spiritual one. If anything should be valued (and valuing is a non-negotiable part of human experience), then this reflexive awareness that, through our existence, the universe has of its own beauty, power, and complexity, should be. The valuing of this profound fact is as spiritual an experience as I can think of.
Of course, it’s not the same kind of spirituality as many mainstream religions offer. It’s true that it eliminates the notion of a personal God, separate from the universe, with an interest in the fates of each and everyone of us. But the alternative it offers is still profoundly spiritual. As one of your other commentators noted, the idea that our existence is fleeting makes each moment precious and irreplaceable. Each human individual is a unique manifestation of the universe’s growing awareness of itself. I certainly find this thought awesomely spiritual. And psilocybin experiences give individuals the direct experience of such facts. One looks at a tree, and one feels at home with it, part of the same enterprise, in some sense.
This is exactly what science teaches. But psilocybin enables one to experience such facts directly – thus its spiritual value. It is one thing to theoretically appreciate a natural phenomenon – say a supernova – and another to experience it directly through instruments, like telescopes. I think psilocybin is an instrument that enables us to experience directly facts that science has long appreciated theoretically: that we are profoundly at home in this universe, and have a special role in it – that of constituting its growing awareness of itself.
This may be a kind of Spinozistic pantheism enhanced with a Hegelian conceptualization of the human role in it. So it’s not the kind of spirituality preached by most religions. But it is a kind of spirituality consistent with science, that makes clear why the human experience of and connection to nature is of paramount value. It is this spiritual insight that the psilocybin experience can reveal in a uniquely direct way.
But what if the universe being conscious of itself is a workable definition of God? In which case, we are indeed made in the image of God but our consciousness is limited by our humanity, by the “fall”. I find far less conflict between these spiritual experiences and the religions that feel threatened by them than others do.
The Dish 