Month: February 2013

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Deana Kjuka highlights the rising use of social media by terrorist cells for propaganda and recruitment—and the increasing difficulty of shutting them down:

As terrorist groups seek to reach a broader global audience, their migration onto social networks has proven to be a challenge for the likes of Twitter and Facebook. While governments want social networks to clamp down on terrorist groups, Internet activists are calling for greater transparency into social-media companies’ rules and regulations.

J.M. Berger explores the debate in counterterrorism over how to handle social-savvy terrorists:

The first objection is that knocking terrorists offline “doesn’t work,” because when you eliminate one account, the terrorists just open up a new account under a different name — which is exactly what al-Shabab did after a little more than a week. And then, the theory goes, you’re back to square one. It’s a high-tech game of whack-a-mole.

The second objection is that forcing terrorists off the Internet destroys a valuable source of intelligence, because government, academic, and private sector researchers rely on these online operations for information about what distant groups are doing and who supports them. “The intelligence community took the position that you cannot take this stuff, you cannot take these sites, down,” intelligence historian Matthew Aid told Voice of America last year after a number of jihadist forums went offline. The argument was that more information was gained “by monitoring these sites than any possible advantage that could be derived from shutting them down. And the intelligence community prevailed on this point.”

(Above: A representative tweet from Al-Shabaab’s Twitter account)

Reviewing Ellen Gruber Garvey’s Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, Christopher Benfey traces the history of the scrapbook in both its political and literary forms:

During the Civil War, Northern and Southern compilers of scrapbooks composed highly selective histories. Southerners combed the news for Confederate victories and sentimental accounts of happy darkies dreading the Northern invaders. The portrayal of black people changed overnight with the Emancipation Proclamation; liberated, they appeared in one popular poem as “brutal fiends, whose reeking knives / Would spare nor sex, nor youth, nor age.” Northern newspapers interspersed grim reportage of Shiloh and Chancellorsville with sappy poems that lamented boys killed in battle.

One legendary author excelled at the art and coined the term as we use it today:

Mark Twain was perhaps the king of American scrapbook culture. According to the OED, he was the first writer to use “scrapbook” as a verb, writing in 1881 about the origins of his book A Tramp Abroad, “I scrap-booked these reports during several months.” Prolific in inventing ways to lose money, especially in his attempts to predict how books would be published in the future (not, he found to his chagrin, with type fashioned from clay), Twain successfully marketed his own patented design for a more efficient scrapbook, outfitted with no-muss adhesive pages and an index awaiting entries.

(Photo by Nate Steiner)

Samuel Goldman seeks a middle ground in the debate:

[Wendell] Cox and [Joel] Kotkin are right to reject stereotypes of the South as backwater good only for resource extraction and the supply of cheap labor. First of all, population growth in the South isn’t driven exclusively by low-skill immigration or monstrous families of slack-jawed yokels. Southern states are also destinations for an increasing number of well-educated. What’s more, the growth sectors are often high-tech. …

Yet Lind is right to point out the importance of “Whig” policies that promote infrastructure, education, and research. The road networks on which Southern sprawl depends isn’t supported by the free market. They’re built and maintained by the federal government. What’s more, growth in the South is being driven by its cities. And hotspots like Raleigh, Austin, and Houston have flourishing universities and STEM sectors that benefit from generous subsidies.

He summarizes his point:

So the South is enjoying impressive economic success. But it’s succeeding because its economic model is more “Northern” than it appears.

Phillip Lopate believes it should be rooted in doubt:

Ever since Michel de Montaigne, the founder of the modern essay, gave as a motto his befuddled “What do I know?” and put forth a vision of humanity as mentally wavering and inconstant, the essay has become a meadow inviting contradiction, paradox, irresolution and self-doubt. The essay’s job is to track consciousness; if you are fully aware of your mind you will find your thoughts doubling back, registering little peeps of ambivalence or disbelief.

Instead he thinks, “more often than not, the applicant is expected to put forward a confident presentation of self that is more like an advertisement, a smooth civic-minded con job, circumventing the essay’s gift for candid, robust self-doubt.” On a related note, an admissions officer discusses reading essays on the job:

You wouldn’t believe some of the essays kids write. Last year there was an essay about this girl’s sexual exploits, right down to this whole voyeuristic thing about her having sex on golf courses. Why would we want to read about that? We also get a lot of religious-themed essays on why you shouldn’t have sex before marriage. I also got what was basically a report on the negative effects of abortion. People write reports on global warming too. That’s not a personal statement!

Lyle Denniston checks in on the Prop 8 battle. He analyzes the Olson-Boies pro-equality brief (above):

The two California same-sex couples’ fifty-four-page brief was a bold attempt to portray the constitutional idea of marriage equality as a victim of homophobia, and to persuade the Court not to settle for a California-only decision, or for one that moved gays and lesbians only a bit closer to marriage, but rather to give them a right to wed as fully as any other couple has, regardless of race, sex, or sexual orientation.

With such a sweeping approach, the brief took a considerable risk that it might be more than the Justices were ready to accept.  But it also has the potential virtue of making it easier for the Court to settle for a ruling for same-sex marriage on narrower grounds – as the Ninth Circuit Court had done in striking down Proposition 8 a year ago.

An excerpt from the brief:

Proponents accuse Plaintiffs (repeatedly) of “redefining marriage.” But it is Proponents who have imagined (not from any of this Court’s decisions) a cramped definition of marriage as a utilitarian incentive devised by and put into service by the State—society’s way of channeling heterosexual potential parents into “responsible procreation.” In their 65-page brief about marriage in California, Proponents do not even mention the word “love.” They seem to have no understanding of the privacy, liberty, and associational values that underlie this Court’s recognition of marriage as a fundamental, personal right. Ignoring over a century of this Court’s declarations regarding the emotional bonding, societal commitment, and cultural status expressed by the institution of marriage, Proponents actually go so far as to argue that, without the potential for procreation, marriage might not “even..exist[ ] at all” and “there would be no need of any institution concerned with sex.” (internal quotation marks omitted). Thus, under Proponents’ peculiar, litigation-inspired concept of marriage, same-sex couples have no need to be married and no cause to complain that they are excluded from the “most important relation in life.” Indeed, Proponents’ state-centric construct of marriage means that the State could constitutionally deny any infertile couple the right to marry, and could prohibit marriage altogether if it chose to pursue a society less committed to “responsible” procreation.

This, of course, reflects a complete “failure to appreciate the extent of the liberty at stake,” not to mention matters such as love, commitment, and intimacy that most Americans associate with marriage. As Proponents see it, marriage exists solely to serve society’s interest; it makes no sense to speak of an individual’s right to marry.

Also, various DOMA briefs are being filed today.

“You’re really not drinking a beard. You’re drinking a great beer that happens to have yeast that comes from a beard,” – John Maier of Rogue Ales Brewery Company in Newport, Oregon.