Month: September 2011

Jon Jensen worries about the state of the revolution:

Just days after the departure of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak on Feb. 11, the nation’s new, self-appointed military leaders pledged, within six months, a swift transition to civilian rule. Crowds of the same protesters that demanded Mubarak’s ouster cheered as their army said it would steer the nation toward a “free, democratic system.” Seven months later, however, many Egyptians are finding that little has changed. As the so-called Supreme Council of the Armed Forces increasingly cements, and in some cases flaunts, its firm grip on power, the revolution that inspired a region is beginning to look more like an old-fashioned military coup.

James Traub is slightly more optimistic. Walter Russell Mead focuses on economic complications.

A reader writes:

In 2010, as far as I can tell, these five states executed the most people:

1. China (2000+)
2. Iran (252+)
3. North Korea (60+)
4. Yemen (53+)
5. USA (46+) 

Two of the top three entities are explicitly atheist. Hitch's assertion that we can ignore Chinese executions because they are a "very nervous oligarchy" can easily be used for Iran considering, you know, they actually have a demonstrable REASON to be nervous – the 2009 protests/Green Movement, hostile relationship with the world's only superpower, etc – and because any analyst of Iran worth his salt will tell you that their government is an extremely Byzantine oligarchy, not a true dictatorship. In other words, you don't get to throw China out and retain the Iranians while making this argument. Yemen is a barely functioning state of tribes. Surprise.

As for us, maybe "God" has something to do with it. But I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest something risky: perhaps it has more to do with a very particular brand of Protestant Christian theology than it does with "God".

I didn't see Hitch accounting for ultra-Catholic South America, where Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela have explicitly abolished the death penalty. There are also a handful of countries that have de facto abolished the practice, having not carried out an execution for at least the last two decades: Dominica (1986), El Salvador (1973), Grenada (1978), Jamaica (1988), Peru (1979), Suriname (1982), Brazil (1876). Most of these nations retain the death penalty for possible use in cases like treason or crimes against humanity. Somehow one of the most religious continents in the world seems to have escaped Hitch's sight.

I get it. Hitch hates God. But this seems like a classic case of him beginning with his own very well-known assumptions and then hastily assembling the best argument he can make to support it. Religious conservatives will always point to communist dictatorships. Liberal atheists will point to religious theocracies. Both are capable of great evil. You don't need to believe in God to murder. And just because you believe in God doesn't preclude you from being a murderer. More than anything, it is just simply absolutism in something that deludes people into murder. 

Copyranter comments:

Cute monster. But what does bottled water protect you from, exactly? Choking and dehydration, I guess. Read more about the spot here. You usually only see someone die in drunk driving or drug awareness spots. But here's another commercial, for a hair growing formula, where a man with a bad toupee falls to his death.

Update from a reader:

What does bottled water protect you from? Go ahead and drink tap water next time you travel India, Copyranter.  The answer will be pretty clear in a day or two.

Why does the Christie boosterism continue? Yesterday was close to unbearable. Nate Silver has a theory:

One way to view the 2012 campaign is as an effort by the Republican Party to identify a viable, electable alternative to Mr. Romney. With other candidates, like Mr. Perry, potentially failing on the electability front, it is easy to see Mr. Christie’s appeal. The fact that Mr. Christie’s ideology is somewhat amorphous — without, like Mr. Romney’s, seeming slippery — is a potential sign of strength, an indication that he may have the persuasive abilities to rally the party behind him, while also appealing to general election voters.

Larison is puzzled by elite dissatisfaction with Romney. I am a little as well. He's been the best debater and the best campaigner so far. He has executive experience. He's from a blue state. He ran last time. He's got the money. Could it be they worry that Mormonism really could depress the Christianist base a little? Or that Romney would be so weak a president vis-a-vis his party he couldn't truly govern effectively? Since the GOP elites seem to have stopped caring about government a long time ago, I suspect it's the sectarian prejudice that's gnawing at them. Hey: feed the tiger and you have to ride it. A political party not based on religious dogma would not have this problem.

Larison gets into the mindset behind Mitt's "Obama apologizes for America" nonsense:

This rhetoric about apologies and other conservatives’ charges that Obama didn’t believe in American exceptionalism were never meant to refer to anything that Obama had actually done. Instead, they were opportunities for the people making these charges to wrap themselves in the mantle of American nationalism, define belief in American exceptionalism in such a way that it could only apply to people who agreed with them, and to impute anti-Americanism to anyone else. The entire exercise is clearly fraudulent, but it is also one that many Republicans find quite satisfying.

And have you noticed Romney's creepy slogan: "Believe In America"? Ugh.

"Send a message to Washington, to Albany, that we will not allow ourselves to be mandated by (government) laws — God's law is supreme," – Johann Christoph Arnold, author and senior pastor of the Bruderhof Church Communities, at an anti-marriage equality event attended by Archbishop Dolan.

Rory Stewart wonders why he could never persuade anyone that our mission in Afghanistan was hopeless:

I knew the international community underestimated the reality of Afghan rural life: they did not grasp just how poor, fragile, and traumatized Afghanistan was; just how conservative and resistant to foreigners, villages could be. Our institutions were too inherently optimistic, too ad hoc, too isolated from the concerns and realities of Afghan life, too caught up in metaphysical abstractions of “governance” and “the rule of law” ever to succeed—or to notice that we were not succeeding. But I don’t think I ever convinced a single international in Kabul that “counterinsurgency” or “state-building” was doomed to failure.

David Rohde takes issue with Stewart's view, while Anne-Marie Slaughter shares her own shift from optimism to a position closer to Stewart's. Tim Lynch is more succinct: "We have based our campaign on a lie and that lie is that we have a viable, legitimate, capable host nation government." Ackerman's reporting backs up Lynch:

[M]ost of Afghanistan’s men in uniform can’t read at a kindergarten level, much less understand the instrument panels on a helicopter or the serial numbers on their rifles. That’s one reason why it’ll be years before the U.S. takes its training wheels off the Afghan soldiers’ bikes. Although the Obama administration plans to turn the war over to forces [Lt. Gen. William Caldwell] trains by 2014, Caldwell told Danger Room in June that the Afghans will need U.S. training until as late as 2017.

Matthieu Aikins reports on horrific abuses by an ally of the host government. Joshua Foust uses the piece to complicate the "good versus evil" narrative in the fight against the Taliban.

All your favorite cinematic stoners:

(Hat tip: TDW)

Dan Amira explains why the New Jersey governor is far too much of a deviationist for today's GOP:

If conservatives think Christie is the answer to their every prayer, they may be making the same mistake they made with Perry — allowing themselves to become enamored with the idea of Christie, while overlooking who he actually is. Conservatives know the New Jersey governor is a straight-talker who slashes budgets and takes on the public unions and yells at people on YouTube. Which is all great, obviously. But on some issues [immigration, gun control, climate change, Race to the Top, and Islam], Republican primary voters would be in for a rude awakening.

 Previous coverage of the Christie hype here and here.

Mai Chau, Vietnam, 7.13 am