Month: September 2011

Not really:

In the end, the whole contraption is really only functioning because non-totalitarian neighbors prefer it not to collapse. The Republic of Korea purports to be the legitimate government of all of Korea, so if a North Korean makes it to the South, they can defect and become citizens. But China doesn’t want to be flooded with refugees from the DPRK and doesn’t want the DPRK to collapse, so they won’t allow the ROK to accept defectors at Chinese consulates. Meanwhile, it’s not clear that South Koreans would genuinely want China to change its mind about this, since reunification would in practice be a gigantic logistical and economic disaster for the ROK. So for now the North survives, and outside actors hope it will become a bit less paranoid and more reformy. This is obviously cold comfort to the DPRK’s victims, but it’s genuinely very different from the stable Eastasia/Eurasia/Oceania troika of 1984.

Eric Cummings reviews Dexter Filkins' book on Afghanistan and Iraq:

As good as The Forever War is, I would also point out that it is just a little too long, especially for a memoir this depressing and ugly and violent. It’s an ugly war in the forever war, and I’m not sure I wanted to read 350 pages of it. I put the book down emotionally exhausted. Then again, that may have been the point.

Norm Geras pushes back against the idea that religion isn't principally about literal belief:

There are religious people who see their faith as importantly involving belief, Karen Armstrong, Terry Eagleton, John Gray and company notwithstanding. One of the ways I know this to be the case, apart from its being widely attested, is that, each time I've posted on the subject, I get emails from people of faith among readers of normblog who say that it isn't true of them that their religion doesn't centre on belief, whatever else it may also involve. If I may venture an analogy here, the Armstrong contingent are like a group of cricket fans who, when chided by others saying that cricket is a boring game, respond with the argument that watching cricket isn't principally about finding the game interesting or entertaining; it's about sitting at the ground and enjoying a day out with your friends. For many who love cricket, that response would be a travesty of their relationship to the sport. It would be so for the very simple reason that… well, not only but also. Still, the defence of religion as not being mainly about belief but about practice is a revealing one. It shows a lack of confidence among those mounting it in the beliefs in question.

Norm compiles his previous arguments here. What he ignores, in my view, is doubt. Does every random Catholic believe at all times that the Blessed Virgin was literally transported into the sky rather than dying – as required by a binding, infallible papal edict? Of course not. There will be times in every believer's life when faith seems dead, or distant, when divine truth eludes us or seems beyond us. This is natural and healthy. If you have never fully doubted, you have never fully believed. And what keeps faith alive at those moments is indeed practice, ritual, discipline, and the small but vital ways in which a Christian reaffirms her faith in day-to-day interactions with other human beings.

And this is the core of Christianity: practice. Jesus insisted that blind adherence to certain absolute truths was never enough, and even dangerous if it led you away from the doing what following Jesus requires. He was always piercing through literal belief to test actual faith. He was impatient with the rule of law in religion and adamant on the rule of love. Similarly, Paul's great letter on caritas/agape insists that even faith that can move mountains is nothing without the practice of caritas/agape.

The interaction between dogma and practice is what religion is. But Christianity really does insist on practice as the core definition (which is why Oakeshott put religion into the "practical" category of human life, not the philosophical). The transformation of what were long deemed myths – Genesis, the Christmas stories, for example – into literal truths is a modern, neurotic development that, as time goes by, requires faith in obvious untruths (like creationism). And in the end, faith must be compatible with truth, or it is a coping mechanism, not a living, coherent belief.

So, yes, revelation matters. But not in every tiny literalist detail. And for faith to live, it must be practised. Fundamentalism, in this sense, is rationalism in religion, to purloin an Oakeshottian phrase. It has to be defeated before the real life of faith can recover and reach more people.

Julian Sanchez unites the libertarian leader and liberal philosopher around the idea of "letting people die".

After Ackerman and Danger Room's tireless work on anti-Muslim prejudice in the FBI, the Bureau has opened an internal investigation into the matter. Adam Serwer explains why it matters from a purely counterterrorism perspective:

If this had been done earlier, the FBI might have avoided some embarrassment. The stakes, of course, are much higher than that. The FBI has vast authority to conduct domestic surveillance, and the kind of Islamophobic cultural illiteracy represented by Gawthrop's training makes it more difficult to locate and identify actual terrorists. It also damages the FBI's ability to form relationships with the American Muslim community, relationships FBI Director Robert Mueller himself has identified as crucial to stopping attacks before they happen.

Wailea, Hawaii, 9.05 am

They've spiked:

It seems possible that if Mr. Perry is the nominee and if economic performance continues to be sluggish, we could wind up with an incumbent president whose disapproval rating is at or above 50 percent matched up against a Republican opponent whose unfavorable rating is also in the 50s. There’s not a lot of historical guidance on what might happen between this proverbial rock and hard place.

But inequality persists:

[Legal restrictions] prevent same-sex couples from receiving the same benefits that married, heterosexual service members get.

That includes health care benefits, help finding work, and financial assistance that eases the difficulty of moving and paying for a new home. Same-sex couples won't be eligible for the additional pay given to partners when a service member is given an assignment that prevents his or her family from coming along. They won't have access to family-support services provided by the military that often serve as crucial conduits of information regarding what forms of assistance are available and how to take advantage of them.

And, when a service member makes the ultimate sacrifice, his or her partner will be denied the same financial support that heterosexual families receive. Unless the two had children together, the partner may not even be the first to know about the death.

This video of Elizabeth Warren defending taxation on the rich is making the rounds:

Paul Waldman cheers:

One of the benefits of the extremist turn of the Republican party in the last couple of years is that it allows us to have these kind of fundamental philosophical discussions.

Weigel thinks the video mirrors Chris Christie's use of new media:

Not only is Warren better on the stump than Coakley, she's starting to star in viral videos of the Chris Christie style. On liberal news sites, this one's racking up thousands of Facebook shares and likes — not Christie territory yet, but promising.

I will, of course, be live-blogging the GOP debate tonight. For my manifold sins.