Month: August 2011

Tom Malinowski, Sarah Holewinski and Tammy Schultz explain the complex subject of "post-conflict reconstruction" through the eyes of J.K. Rowling.

As top military officials in Turkey begin to stand trial for opposing Erdogan's grip on government, Soner Cagaptay eulogizes Turkish secularism:

As the Ottoman Empire vanished after World War I, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk created a new Turkey in the mold of Europe. Controlling all levers of power, including the military, Ataturk implemented his vision by mandating a separation between religion, public policy and government, and by telling his compatriots to consider themselves intuitively Western. It took a century and a democratic revolution invoked by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) — a coalition of conservatives, reformed Islamists and Islamists that came to power in 2002 — for Turkey's "Kemalist Occident," or dalliance with the West, to end. With the mass resignation of Turkey's military leadership last month, the last standing Kemalist institution, the army, has succumbed to the AKP's decade-long political tsunami. This political bookend for Kemalism suggests that AKP leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan is Turkey's "new" Ataturk. He doesn't have the cachet of being Turkey's liberator, but he enjoys as much power as Ataturk once had.

(Photo via Tumblr user poundoflogic, who captions "Mustafa Ataturk, who sought the modernization of Turkey, is seen wearing a European-style suit and teaching the Latin alphabet, 1928.")

A reader responds to the rant against Angry Birds:

This is nothing more than a self-anointed gaming connoisseur telling us that we have bad taste. I'm rather reminded of this Nick Hornby passage from Fever Pitch:

A critical faculty is a terrible thing. When I was eleven there were no bad films, just films that I didn’t want to see, there was no bad food, just Brussels sprouts and cabbage, and there were no bad books – everything I read was great. Then suddenly, I woke up in the morning and all that had changed. How could my sister not hear that David Cassidy was not in the same class as Black Sabbath? Why on earth would my English teacher think that The History of Mr Polly was better than Ten Little Indians by Agatha Christie? And from that moment on, enjoyment has been a much more elusive quality.

Another returns to talk of gaming:

Based on his comparison of the media attention paid to Angry Birds to the lack of attention paid to Tetris, I'm guessing your ranter of the day is under 25. Were he as old as I, he'd know that when it first showed up on our dainty black-and-white Macintosh computers back in the late '80s, Tetris made a very big splash, and in the press plenty of ink was spilled attesting to the game's popularity and addictive qualities. Indeed, the Tetris fad of the late '80s and early '90s bear an uncanny resemblance to the Angry Birds phenomenon today: Tetris was a casual gaming phenomenon that ensnared even people who normally showed little interest in video gaming and thus became part of our popular culture in ways that hardcore gaming titles simply did not.

From Wiki:

While versions of Tetris were sold for a range of 1980s home computer platforms, it was the hugely successful handheld version for the Game Boy launched in 1989 that established the game as one of the most popular ever. Electronic Gaming Monthly's 100th issue had Tetris in first place as "Greatest Game of All Time". In 2007, Tetris came in second place in IGN's "100 Greatest Video Games of All Time" (2007).^[13] It has sold more than 70 million copies.^[14]

Paul Bonicelli is buoyed by the apparent success of mass protests in Dailan in forcing the government to close a polluting chemical plant:

The plant in question is not one that exploded or suffered a massive leak, though citizens fear such because it is close to a seawall that is unsound. More importantly, this massive plant that represents a significant part of the country's petrochemical production and therefore significant investment, was built a few years ago with the public kept in the dark and with disregard of environmental concerns. It would appear, then, that what happened with this protest was the boiling over of public resentment at be treated as subjects rather than as citizens.

We have been seeing more and more of this in the last few years; a quick web search will reveal scores of incidents of protest and public opposition to government policy. With citizens readily choosing non-Communists for elected posts in municipal governments, physically attacking local officials for enforcing the one-child policy, and rioting over environmental and safety concerns, the public is showing that an increasingly connected and prospering people are growing restive with tyranny. We have been used to the "stoic Chinese" enduring repression. Maybe that is changing.

Walter Russell Mead is cautiously optimistic. Elsewhere, Ian Johnson has a chilling interview with Chinese dissident Liao Yiwu about the history of the Communist Party's repression.

(Photo: Chinese paramilitary police stand guard as hundreds of people protest against the building of the Fujia chemical plant in Dalian, in northeast China's Liaoning province on August 14, 2011. Authorities in the Chinese city ordered the immediate shutdown of a chemical plant as thousands of protesters took to the streets demanding the factory be moved over pollution fears. By STR/AFP/Getty Images)

FP is featuring a series of essays on the subject. From Andrew Krepinevich's take on the evolution of warfare:

As in the cyber realm, the very advances in biotechnology that appear to offer such promise for improving the human condition have the potential to inflict incalculable suffering. For example, "designer" pathogens targeting specific human subgroups or designed to overcome conventional antibiotics and antiviral countermeasures now appear increasingly plausible, giving scientists a power once thought to be the province of science fiction. As in the cyber realm, such advances will rapidly increase the potential destructive power of small groups, a phenomenon that might be characterized as the "democratization of destruction."

Amy Myers Jaffe turns to a somewhat happier topic, energy:

By the 2020s, the capital of energy will likely have shifted back to the Western Hemisphere, where it was prior to the ascendancy of Middle Eastern megasuppliers such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the 1960s. … With the help of horizontal drilling and other innovations, shale gas production in the United States has skyrocketed from virtually nothing to 15 to 20 percent of the U.S. natural gas supply in less than a decade. By 2040, it could account for more than half of it. This tremendous change in volume has turned the conversation in the U.S. natural gas industry on its head; where Americans once fretted about meeting the country's natural gas needs, they now worry about finding potential buyers for the country's surplus.

Several more topics here.

Erik Loomis wants us to consider the consequences of overfishing:

The idea that it is somehow more responsible to eat fish rather than other meat has little relation to reality. While it is true that fish have far less of a carbon footprint than beef, the fish industry is literally wiping out the entire ocean. Some of the problem is overfishing of species. But much of the problem is also the widespread extermination of large ocean life, including sharks, dolphins, turtles, and birds, through getting caught in the industrial technology used to give us cheap cans of tuna.

(Chart by Daniel Fromson)

Philip Klein's take:

Pawlenty has a compelling personal life story and has been can be perfectly likable in person. Were he to have simply been himself, he would have had a better chance to bond with voters on a personal level. And if you do that, they're more forgiving when you explain various "clunkers" in your record, as Pawlenty liked to put it. Unfortunately, Pawlenty's need to make up for his various deviations from conservatism resulted in a consultant-driven, overly scripted campaign. That's the exact opposite of what he needed to do if he was going to differentiate himself. Nobody is going to out robot Mitt Romney.

Reihan nods and promises a full response later this week. His co-author Ross sounds off:

[D]espite some blue-collar posturing, [Pawlenty didn't] run on anything remotely like the kind of "Sam’s Club" conservatism that he once seemed poised to champion.

Some of the time, as Matt Bai writes, he seemed "tentative and risk-averse," trying to be all things to all conservatives instead of forging a distinctive identity of his own. Then when he did stake out strong positions, he cast himself as the supply-sider’s supply-sider and the hawk’s hawk, promising magical growth unicorns and interventionism without end. It was a peculiar strategy: He was trying to fill the populist space that Mike Huckabee had left vacant, but he spent most of his time either imitating Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful “Mr. Conservative” campaign from 2008 or else channeling the policy preferences of the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Calling Pawlenty "the canary in the establishment coal mine," James Poulos argues that his status quo message "no longer computes with a critical mass of Republican voters: not just in Ames, Iowa, but nationwide." Earlier eulogies here.

(Photo of a card handed out by the Pawlenty campaign at a town hall in Boone, Iowa last week. By Weigel)

Today on the Dish, Perry and Bachmann continued to flash their Christianism and Dominionism, but Andrew conceded Perry could torpedo Bachmann, especially on the economy. Perry revived the old "women should iron my shirt" joke, the internet seized on his craziest ideas, and he stooped low enough to call the troops' respect for the president into question. Bachmann's lies made Palin look like George Washington, Robert Costa earned a poseur alert for his poetic description of Marcus Bachmann's small moments, and Ron Paul got the shaft from the WSJ. We eulogized Pawlenty's failed campaign, J.F. backtracked on the "Pawlenty-sized" hole he previously saw in the race, and Iowa may or may not matter. Some Alaskans thought Palin sold out, and the Tea Party approached jumping the shark with their challenge to Allen West.

In world news, Andrew honed in on what the war in Iraq didn't achieve, while Iraq's response to the Arab Spring has been to befriend the Syrian regime, and James Wright urged Congress to enact a wartime surtax. We heard from a normal guy drafted into Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Pakistan betrayed us to China, and Glenn Greenwald attacked the denialism of Dennis Blair about children killed by drone warfare. We continued to parse our role in Somalia's violence, capitalism and Islam have a complicated relationship, and torture diamonds are the new blood diamonds.

The Catholic church had to grapple with the fact that Adam and Eve never existed and Mark Vernon wondered if all our models of true forgiveness are false. Medicare spending is falling in advance of the Affordable Care Act, but Nouriel Roubini informed us Karl Marx may have been right about the failure of capitalism. Charles Marohn argued we don't need more roads or suburban sprawl, readers plumbed the inner workings of the credit card business, and college websites suck. Female pirates cross-dressed, Dennis Rodman got choked up, and a reader berated Andrew for his simplistic Angry Birds obsession. We debated whether a new Star Trek movie should have gays boldly go there, movies went improv, and sexual economics don't account for casual (free) sex. Nicer coworkers make for a longer life, Jessa Crispin praised unconventional travel, when people go looking for meaning, they usually find shopping, and creativity loves an idle mind.

Map of the day here, chart of the day here, Von Hoffman award here, VFYW here, MHB here, and FOTD here.

Also life imitated art in the Sully + beagle world, and the new Dish app is here!

–Z.P.

(Photo: Republican presidential candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry, right, eats a pork chop with Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey for Secretary of Agriculture at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Iowa. By Tom Williams/Roll Call)

The far right can mock; others can see through the dust:

"I think that we forget when [Martin Luther King Jr.] was alive there was nobody who was more vilified, nobody who was more controversial, nobody who was more despairing at times. There was a decade that followed the great successes of Birmingham and Selma in which he was just struggling, fighting the good fight, and scorned, and many folks angry.  But what he understood, what kept him going, was that the arc of moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.  But it doesn’t bend on its own.  It bends because all of us are putting our hand on the arc and we are bending it in that direction.  And it takes time.  And it's hard work.  And there are frustrations."

Adam Frank marvels at the depths of time we see when we look up:

Catch a glimpse of a relatively nearby star and you see it as it existed when, perhaps, Lincoln was president (if it's 150 light-years away). Stars near the edge of our own galaxy are only seen as they appeared when the last ice age was in full bloom (30,000 light-years away). And those giant pinwheel assemblies of stars called galaxies are glimpsed, as they existed millions, hundreds of millions or even billions of years in the past. We never see the sky as it is, but only as it was.

(Video: A "fly-through of the known universe," 6df Galaxy Survey fly through from ICRAR)