Month: April 2013

The View From Russia

Marc Champion argues that, for “the Chechen nationalist cause, a terrorist attack in the U.S. carried out by Chechens is an unmitigated disaster”:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought for years to portray the Chechen conflict as purely a problem of jihadi terrorism, directly equivalent to al-Qaeda. He has urged the U.S. and Europe to join him in fighting this scourge shoulder-to-shoulder, rather than quibble over human-rights abuses committed by Russian forces in Chechnya. Putin never quite succeeded in selling his simple Chechnya-as-counterterrorist-problem narrative.

Julia Ioffe explains how Putin sees terrorism:

To Putin, the Taliban and the Chechen separatists, the Salafis and Wahabis, Hamas and the Free Syrian Army are all one. It is why he can be friendly both with Bibi Netanyahu and with Bashar al-Assad: He feels their pain, he fights their fight at home. In fact, his presidency was baptized by the fire of domestic terrorism and war against an Islamist insurgency in the North Caucasus. His subjects and his capital have been attacked many times, most recently in March 2010, when two young women from Dagestan blew themselves up in the Moscow metro during the morning rush hour.

The Danger Of Anti-Drug PSAs

They could be counterproductive:

In a 2008 study, participants who were primed with anti-drug PSAs were more curious about using drugs than those that hadn’t seen the PSAs. Wagner and his co-author, S. Shyam Sundar, found that because anti-drug ads made the viewer think more about drugs, it could also lead them to believe drug use is more prevalent than it really is. “These results should be seriously considered, as it has been consistently recognized in psychological research that curiosity is one of the most potent motivational forces for human behavior,” the paper warned.

A Ban On Gay Role Models

The Boy Scouts plans to end its ban on gay troops. J. Bryan Lowder urges the group to also allow gay troop leaders:

What message do you think it sends to a gay teenager when the adult version of himself is considered unworthy of being a role model? Indeed, when the official policy feels that he would be a “distraction” to the process of becoming a good adult? Amanda pointed out in her post that the BSA should stop trafficking in the notion that adult gay men are dangerous to youths, as studies have shown time and again that that is not the case. Seconded. But my suspicion is that they already have. What really scares them is not the malign influence of lecherous gay men on boys; rather, it’s the validation, comfort, and hope that having strong gay role models would provide to boys with an identity that the BSA wishes would go away. If the goal is to transform boys into men who are “physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight,” then the BSA must acknowledge that gay men can be all of those things, too.

The Greenwald-Harris Debate

It was about the term Islamophobia – a conflation, in my mind, of legitimate and important secular criticism of Islam with racist, xenophobic bigotry. I think there’s a difference between these two phenomena – and in the wake of the Boston bombings, I can’t think of a better time to re-examine the issue. Here is the email exchange between Sam and Glenn that prompted this long piece of self-defense by Sam. My favorite point from Sam:

[E]ven if Noam Chomsky were right about everything, the Islamic doctrines related to martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, apostasy, the rights of women and homosexuals, etc. would still present huge problems for the emergence of a global civil society.

How can one seriously deny that? All religions contain elements of this kind of fanaticism. But Islam’s fanatical side – from the Taliban to the Tsarnaevs – is more murderous than most.

Padilla vs Tsarnaev; Bush vs Obama

The first US citizen, Jose Padilla, was captured on US soil, detained without formal charges, accused of plotting a dirty bomb, and then brutally tortured until he was a human wreck. Eventually, the dirty bomb charges were dropped in the legal process. And there was a serious question about whether, after such brutal torture and isolation, he had been psychologically brutalized by his own government to the point of insanity.

Tsarnaev, in contrast, was formally charged this morning, will be tried in a civilian court, go through due process, and face a weight of evidence against him.

This is why we elected Obama. To bring America back. To defend this country without betraying its core principles.

Chart Of The Day

wsjlongformjpg

Noting the absence of the WSJ from this year’s Pulitzer finalists, Dean Starkman charts the number of WSJ pieces longer than 2,500 words:

A common trait among Pulitzer projects is that they are ambitious, require extensive reporting and careful writing, carry some significance beyond the normal gathering of news, and/or have some kind of impact on the real world, like, as I’ve written, fixing Walter Reed. Basically, this is work that takes a long time to do and requires some length in which to do it. And just because a project has all those elements obviously doesn’t mean it’s going to win anything. Public-service projects have to be a routine and done for their own sake.

[Rupert] Murdoch’s oft-stated antipathy to the concept of longform narrative public-interest journalism was the main reason some of us opposed his taking over the Journal in the first place. … It’s been well-reported what he thinks about the public-service aspect of journalism, which in some quarters is also known as, “the point.” His biographer/medium, Michael Wolff, reports, ad nauseum, on Murdoch’s view: “The entire rationale of modern, objective, arm’s-length, editor-driven journalism—the quasi-religious nature of which had blossomed in no small way as a response to him—he regarded as artifice if not an outright sham.” Wolff had 50 hours of interviews with Murdoch, by the way, so he’s not guessing here.