Adam Rothstein argues that we "live in a drone culture, just as we once lived in a car culture." He claims the "Northrop-Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk is your '55 Chevrolet":
Our technological capacity for watching, recording, collecting, and archiving has never been wider, and has never been more automated. The way we look at the world—our basic ethnographic approach—is mimicking the technology of the drone.
The above Firing Line discussion on the upheaval of Keynesian economics seems apposite for the day. Jim Epstein and Nick Gillespie pay tribute to the famed economist behind it:
[Friedman’s] ultimate contribution to freedom and liberty is found less in any of the specific argument he made and more in the ways he made them. Friedman provided an all-too-rare example of a public intellectual who was scrupulously honest, forthright, and fair in every debate he entered. Whether he was duking it out with fellow Nobel Prize winners and other high-profile economists or making the case for the morality of capitalism with TV hosts such as Phil Donahue and angry students, he always argued in good faith, admitted when he was wrong, and enlarged the circle of debate.
Friedman's Open Mind interview is worth another look.
Julian Sanchez believes they do:
It’s true, most self-described “ex gays” sound like they’re engaged in a religiously-motivated form of denial, rather than responding to some genuine personal epiphany about their inner nature. But if people who are actually gay can go years or decades convincing themselves (or trying to convince themselves) that they’re straight, surely it’s at least possible that some small handful of actually-straight people sometimes convince themselves they’re gay.
Nope. Never found one. The reason? So much of the culture and the environment and social pressure is for heterosexuality. It's the norm. Very, very few people who are the norm in a society where the norm is overwhelmingly celebrated, are going to be in denial that they're really straight. Maybe a few fluid lesbians in college. But that's it. I can't imagine a straight guy feeling in any way pressured to live a gay life.
The vast majority of "ex-gays," in my view, are not ex-gay in any internal sense; except if their inability to accept their true nature is so overwhelming that they'd rather live as tortured heteros than marginalized homos. They can do it, of course, and it should emphatically be their choice. But in many cases, it will come at enormous personal and human cost.
Still, good luck to them. My view is that the point of the gay rights movement is not to force everyone to be gay, or even every gay person to be openly gay, it is to expand the possibilities for individuals to be themselves. That must include those gays who cannot bear to be who they are. Unhappiness, like happiness, is an option every free society should respect.
The en masse resignations appear to have cemented Erdogan's control over the military:
In 2010, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan sat beside the armed forces chief at an annual meeting to decide on appointments in the military command. On Monday, he sat alone at the head of the table, a symbol of civilian authority over the generals whose top commanders resigned last week in a dispute with the government. The symbolism of the seating scheme delivered the message that Turkey’s military, which once staged coups and presided over the writing of the constitution in the early 1980s, had lost another battle in a power struggle with a government with strong electoral support.
Gul Tuysuz and Liz Sly agree. Benny Morris sees a victory for stealth Islamists, whereas Walter Russell Mead believes the resignations were defeat for absolutist secularism and a victory for democracy:
In Turkey, a sometimes feisty and over the top Kemalist regime has given way to a sometimes feisty and over the top group of Islamists; in the Arab world a gaggle of failed secularist modernizers is being driven from power by waves of public resentment and frustration. Either way, the century in which French secularism was the dominant ideological force in the Middle East has now clearly come to an end. From Pakistan to Morocco the Muslim world has turned its back on the modernity of the 20th century. God only knows what comes next.
(Photo: Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan (C) is flanked by Ground Forces Commander and acting Chief of Staff General Necdet Ozel (L) during a wreath-laying ceremony at the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of modern Turkey, in Ankara on August 1, 2011. By AFP/Getty Images)
Melissa Matthes pushes back against the thesis of Mark Oppenheimer's piece on Dan Savage. She believes the demands of monogamy can be "what actually make us fully human":
Desire is not made in isolation. And we know (at least since Augustine) that humans need a community of virtue in order to desire rightly. Yet, Savage makes it seem as if any sexual desire one has (unless it involves feces, children, pets, incest and the dead) is legitimate. And, while I appreciate these caveats, they are insufficient. Not because I think we should be policing sexual desire in some draconian, puritan way, but because it is still worthwhile for each of us to explore in more detail how desires are cultivated, why we want what we want, and, perhaps, what is the difference between “real” and “artificial” wants. Or perhaps more accurately, it is still worthwhile to consider which wants, desires, urges are themselves symptomatic of other more foundational desires — perhaps for power, intimacy, or recognition. Again, it’s unclear why sexual desire is privileged. Isn’t sexual desire, itself, sometimes (often?) epiphenomenal?
Earlier discussions of monogamy and marriage flexibility here, here and here.
Nate Silver points them out: spending cuts backloaded to avoid too big a near-term effect on the economy; and defense spending as the focus for the trigger. If you add in the relief of not going into default and all that could have done to the economy, that's about it.
Jonathan Bernstein attempts to calm upset liberals:
I think a lot of what's hitting liberals over the last couple of weeks is a delayed reaction to the severity of the Republican landslide of 2010. And I'm not at all convinced that the policy changes so far this year are any worse for Democrats than the policy changes in 1995-1996.
Seth Masket, meanwhile, explains why fiscal balance isn't easy.
Phillip Klein thinks that the marriage of convenience between hawks and tax cut ideologues is over:
We’ll start to see more and more opposition from conservative defense hawks to slashing the military budget, while the Norquist crowd will continue to push Republicans to accept more defense cuts to avoid any increase in taxes. This is likely to be the opening of significant debate among conservatives that will likely continue for decades to come, given the increasing pressure posed by entitlements.
Alana Goodman places head firmly in sand.
(Photo: Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist arrives for an immigration reform rally and news conference on Capitol Hill June 27, 2006 in Washington, DC. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)
While claiming not to support the mass-murder, Geller nonetheless sees its logic:
Breivik was targeting the future leaders of the party responsible for flooding Norway with Muslims who refuse to assimilate, who commit major violence against Norwegian natives, including violent gang rapes, with impunity, and who live on the dole… all done without the consent of the Norwegians.
More here, and the citation of a sentence where she decried race-mixing at the sumer camp.
Her key argument, such as it is, rests on the fact that these camps were virulently opposed to the Gaza war and to the West Bank settlements. Increasingly, the far right government in Israel is the rallying point for the far right Christianist movement in Europe and the US. From Sarah Palin's Israeli flag to Mike Huckabee's celebration of West Bank settlements, the civilizational war is no longer Christianity vs Islam, it is Judeo-Christianity vs Islam. And the focal point for the apocalyptic clash? Israel.
I wonder when Israel was founded if its leaders ever dreamed of a day when their most stalwart allies for Greater Israel would be neo-fascist movements in Europe. There are ironies and then there are tragedies.
The Dish 