Month: August 2011

Rebels have infiltrated his stronghold of Tripoli for the first time in months. Al Jazeera sets the scene:

Security forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi have used heavy machine guns and mortars to confront lightly armed opposition forces and protesters who took to the streets of Tripoli on Saturday night in anticipation of a final rebel advance on the capital. Fighting continued into Sunday morning in a few central and eastern  neighbourhoods, and rebel flags were raised over some buildings, witnesses said. Much of the population took cover inside their homes.

Outside of Tripoli, rebel fighters closed in. They advanced tens of kilometres from Zawiyah, to the west, seizing the town of al-Mayah and putting themselves within several kilometres of the capital's suburbs. Other rebel formations remained further way, stationed to the south, in Gharyan, and to the east, in Zlitan.

Despite the greatest challenge yet to his power, Gaddafi remained pugnacious, issuing a telephoned audio address in which he exhorted his followers and congratulated them for defeating the "rats".

Latest updates here, including: "Libya rebels on Sunday infiltrated the capital Tripoli by sea in a covert operation launched from their western enclave of Misrata, a rebel spokesman said." (See above video, via EA.) Another update lists several neighborhoods captured by rebels (above map via Mackey). Opposition leaders are projecting confidence:

Libyan rebel officials in Dubai say they have already started efforts to stabilise the country before the possible fall of Muammar Gaddafi's regime. … Members of the rebel "stabilization team" are showing confidence as their forces press closer to the capital Tripoli. Team chairman Ahmed Jehani says a transition period is already under way. He called Sunday  "day one" for efforts to prepare the country for a post-Gaddafi era, reports AP.

Enduring America is live-blogging. Scott Lucas steps back:

In March, only a few weeks after the sudden start of the uprising against the Qaddafi regime in Libya, I rather rashly titled a LiveBlog, "Endgame in Libya?" That projection stalled as Libya effectively split in two, with the opposition controlled the eastern part of the country and setting up its base in the second-largest city, Benghazi. The military situation fluctuated, with Qaddafi forces taking back town seized by the insurgents.

In recent weeks, however, both James Miller and I had been watching the gradual but clear advance of opposition fighters on three fronts towards the capital. Friday's takeover of Zawiya, 50 kilometres (30 miles) west of Tripoli, was a significant symbolic as well as military breakthrough — the town had been taken weeks into the uprising by insurgents but then had been re-occupied after bloody fighting by Qaddafi's men. Zlitan, 60 kilometres (37 miles) east of the capital and the only major town between Tripoli and opposition-held Misurata, was "liberated" for the first time by the insurgents.

So the stage was being set for a final battle for the capital. Still, we did not expect events to occur so quickly.

Tony Woodlief draws an extended metaphor:

We are god-obsessed the way a child snatched from his mother will always have his heart and flesh tuned to her, even after he forgets her face. Cover the earth with orphans and you will find grown men fashioning images of mothers and worshipping strong women and crafting myths about mothers who have left or were taken or whose spirits dwell in the trees. And at the edges of their tribal fires will stand the anthropologist and the philosopher, reasoning that all this mother-talk is simply proof that men are prone to invent stories about mothers, which is itself proof that no single story about a mother could be true, which is proof that the brain just evolved to work that way.

It’s the only narrative that fits the facts while affirming the skeptic’s presupposition that all this mother business is just leftover hokum from the dark ages. Except that in a century, when the most famous of the skeptics is long forgotten, broken men will still be telling stories about what we have lost, and what we pray is still out there, coming even now to set all things right.

(Photo: By Bernardí Roig via Colossal)

Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man:

If no organic being excepting man had possessed any mental power, or if his powers had been of a wholly different nature from those of the lower animals, then we should never have been able toHow  convince ourselves that our high faculties had been gradually developed.

Justin Smith elaborates:

If it were not for animals, we would misunderstand our higher faculties; we would take them to have popped into being suddenly and miraculously. We would take ourselves to be angels, and we angels would be deprived of the bulk of our metaphors, which is to say of the bulk of our language, as well as of any bearings or sense of situatedness within any broader community of beings. We would be lonely, inarticulate angels. Instead we are animals that won't shut up ('rational animals', is how this has sometimes been put), and, whether we care to admit it or not, we are not alone.

Building off the writings of Henry Adams, Andrew Bacevich fears that god-like technology is replacing the divine:

Anyone who today works with or near young people cannot fail to see this: for members of the present generation, the smartphone has become an amulet. It is a sacred object to be held and caressed and constantly attended to. Previous generations fell in love with their cars or became addicted to TV, but this one elevates devotion to material objects to an altogether different level. In the guise of exercising freedom, its members engage in a form of idolatry.

(Photo of a "Pilgrimage to THE Apple Store," by Flickr user Global X)

Anthony Aguirre demonstrates:

Infinity can violate our human intuition, which is based on finite systems, and create perplexing philosophical problems. A classic example was invented by the mathematician David Hilbert. Rather than imagining an infinite universe, imagine an infinite hotel, with all rooms completely filled. Though the hotel is full, you can accommodate infinitely many more guests by moving each guest into the room of twice its current number and adding guests in all of the odd rooms. Yet although you double the number of guests, the hotel looks exactly the same. Applying this notion to an eternally inflating universe, suppose the whole bubbling mess is infinite at some time. Although infinitely many bubbles have formed during some time interval, it is rather unclear that after this time the universe is actually any bigger!

Heather Horn interviewed Robert Bellah, author of Religion in Human Evolution. He revisited some ideas from his famous 1967 essay "Civil Religion in America":

Civil religion in America is still alive and well. Obama not only now faithfully wears his flag pin—which I hate—he ends any serious intervention by saying "God bless you and God bless America." What is that? You never find an inaugural address without reference to God. You won't find one referring to Jesus either, because that's not part of the civil religion. But religious symbols remain in American public life come hell or high water—you just can't get rid of them, and they do provide some sense of common language. I don't think Martin Luther King would have had the impact that he did if he'd spoken only in secular terms. His great speeches are full of reference to American civil figures, but they are also deeply Biblical. So all our diversity doesn't mean that we don't understand certain things in common—even if we don't accept them in the absolute way.

(Photo by Flickr user Daquella Manera)

Charles Taylor traces the history of western secularism in his book Rethinking Secularism. Mark Oppenheimer, reviewing some of Taylor's related works, explores one of his larger themes:

In the Catholic world, it was too easy to feel that none of us mattered—all that did matter was present in the church, or the Mass, or heaven. But once it became clear that God was present when you read the Bible, it also became clear that the affairs of those Bible readers mattered to God. Taylor seems to say that Protestantism rescued Catholicism. Modernity gives us horrors, but also graces such as we never knew: “The age of Hiroshima and Auschwitz has also produced Amnesty International and Médecins sans Frontières.” Taylor says that Christianity “needed this breach with the culture of Christendom…for the impulse of solidarity to transcend the frontier of Christendom itself.” Pan-human solidarity, so much a part of our humanity now, is too valuable to lose. So the work at hand is to live with modernity: it’s worth it.

Adam Lee theorizes why unbelievers are on the rise:

I’d love to say that we atheists did it all ourselves; I’d love to be able to say that our dazzling wit and slashing rhetorical attacks are persuading people to abandon organized religion in droves. But the truth is that the churches’ wounds are largely self-inflicted. By obstinately clinging to prejudices that the rest of society is moving beyond, they’re in the process of making themselves irrelevant. In fact, there are indications that it’s a vicious circle: as churches become less tolerant and more conservative, their younger and more progressive members depart, which makes their average membership still more conservative, which accelerates the progressive exodus still further, and so on. (A similar dynamic is at work in the Republican party, which explains their increasing levels of insanity over the past two or three decades.)

Jerry Coyne concurs:

So much for the mantra that "religion is here to stay," a claim that I always find annoying—and wrong in light of the dramatic decline of religion in much of Europe over the last two centuries.  If religion does stay, it will increasingly be in a less virulent form that doesn’t oppress women or gays, or intrude into the sexual lives of consenting adults. And we can count that as a victory.

Albany, New York, 5.04 pm