Author: Andrew Sullivan

Autumn Sandeen notes that Tiwonge Chimbalanga, who was given a 14 year sentence last week under Malawi’s anti-homosexuality law, identifies as a woman. Sandeen believes that "we can safely say that from past coverage by the LGBT press and LGBT blogosphere that this story would not have gained as much traction in LGBT media if this were considered a transgender or intersex story". But Jim Burroway isn't sure that either the gay or transgender label fits:

It turns out that in many traditional cultures, it may be more acceptable for women to take on what westerners perceive as “masculine” traits, and for men to take on what westerners would label more “feminine” traits. Which means that many of the external peripheral markers that we use to understand the contours of our masculinity or femininity become less important in many traditional cultures. But in these non-western cultures, gender roles — what men and women do as opposed to who they are — are considered much more important in defining what is a man and what is a woman. Against that realty, our understanding of gay/straight/transgender/whatever has only a passing relevance.

Packer reviews the memoir of Abdul Salam Zaeef, who served as Afghanistan's ambassador to Pakistan during Taliban rule. Zaeef was detained for three years at Gitmo and released without charge. Packer calls his memoir, My Life with the Taliban "perhaps the best, and maybe even the only, way for readers here to begin to grasp the world view of this xenophobic and opaque movement."

Keep in mind that Zaeef is sometimes referred to as a moderate:

The Americans have won the hatred of all Afghans, he concludes, and will lose the war as the Soviets lost theirs: the whole world is turning away from the U.S. and coming to see the justice of the Islamic cause. Like any religious revolutionary, Zaeef is certain that history and faith will soon rhyme. His entire story is saturated in righteousness; all the hardships he endures are redeemed by the solidarity of the faithful, whose superiority to non-Muslims is taken for granted. Zaeef doesn’t even pay lip service to the notion of equal rights for all: the only outrage is what’s done to Muslims, because they are Muslims and better than the rest of humanity. This world view is founded on such chauvinism that Americans, with our automatic assumptions about equality, might fail to notice it. “My Life with the Taliban” shows that, while all wars are foolish, some wars are not a matter of mere misunderstanding—that beneath the superficial differences of clothing and facial hair lie more profound differences that can’t be reconciled.

McKay Coppins tells the story of how anonymous readers on MetaFilter, the link-sharing community, rallied around two Russian women caught in a human-trafficking scheme.

A reader writes:

The one thing Harry Reasoner got right in his diatribe against hippies was the work ethic that blossomed in San Francisco in the sixties, the tendency to "approach work the way the rest of us do sport." That attitude, about which Reasoner was so dismissive, shaped the cultures of technology and philanthropy and even influenced investing in Silicon Valley and beyond.

John Markoff chronicled the connection between computing and the "counterculture" in his 2005 book, What The Dormouse Said. Markhoff revealed what everyone in the Valley has always known, that the counterculture was not limited to runaway kids dancing and screwing in the park. The researchers at SRI and other research facilities in the area were getting high and fighting the status quo. They sent their kids to the famous Peninsula School in Menlo Park by day and went back in the evening for meetings of the HomeBrew club where they discussed how the computer would be a tool for personal and communal transformation.

Many of those HomeBrew guys went on to build world changing technologies and launch successful companies (I know – I live with one).

They marched against the war, read Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalogue, joined The Well and donated money to land trusts that have preserved significant open spaces along the coast and in the Bay Area hills. Their idealism is still embedded in the way programmers and user interface engineers think and produce.

While the smug Reasoner was lamenting, "when one thinks of the problems of our day that the cry for attack, imagination and youthful energy this seems like the greatest waste of all…" the seeds of digital connectivity were being planted and things we take for granted, like graphical interface and the computer mouse, were being developed. Sure some people burned out like Jerry Garcia but most of those kids in the park didn't. They followed Stewart Brand, Steve Jobs and Don Knuth, men who are very different from one another but who share connections to the counterculture. They, more than the Grateful Dead, shaped our world. Just as the MSM misses much of what is significant today, settling instead for name-calling and breast-beating, Reasoner missed the real story.

(Photo: A souvenir shop is seen as the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock music festival approaches August 13, 2009 in Woodstock, New York. On August 15-17 in 1969 an estimated 400,000 music fans gathered on Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel, N.Y. for the most celebrated music festival ever. While the original Woodstock concert was held in Bethel, the festival was conceived and originally planned for the town of Woodstock, which was and remains an artistic community. By Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Not a Ricky Gervais podcast. Better.

Yes, the debt largely is Bush's fault. – and his predecessors'.

Julian Sanchez has a judicious take on Rand Paul and on Libertarianism more generally:

At the scene of a four-century crime against humanity—the kidnap, torture, enslavement, and legal oppression of African-Americans—ideal theory fails. We libertarians, never burdened with an excess of governing power, have always had a utopian streak, a penchant for imagining what rich organic order would bubble up from the choices of free and equal citizens governed by a lean state enforcing a few simple rules. We tend to envision societies that, if not perfect, are at least consistently libertarian.

Unfortunately, history happened.

Rules for utopia can deal with individual crimes—the mugger and the killer and the vandal—but they stumble in the face of societywide injustice. They tell us the state shouldn't sanction the brutal enslavement or humiliating legal subordination of a people; they have less to say about what to do once we have. They tell us to respect the sanctity of the property rights that would arise as free people tamed the wilderness in John Locke's state of nature. They have less to say about the sanctity of property built on generations of slave sweat and blood.

Libertarians need to think harder about how our principles should degrade elegantly, how they can guide us through a fallen world where the live political options seldom afford a full escape from injustice.

Travels With Shiloh attended a recent conference at Fort Leavenworth, the intellectual hub of counterinsurgency doctrine:

While, current U.S. policy states that we'll begin withdrawing our forces in 2011 there was a universal recognition that any real effort to apply COIN in Afghanistan would take a very long time. While the subject wasn't addressed (except for one question at the final Q&A roundtable) my impression was that all of the speakers (British, Canadian and U.S.) were operating under the assumption that forces would be in place well beyond 2011.

I heard no discussion about how to conduct any sort of hand off to the Afghans within 18 months, alterations to COIN theory or doctrine or trains of thought about alternate ways militaries could support/conduct COIN without significant numbers of forces on the ground. I would interpret that to mean that the military has been given the word (explicitly or implicitly) that that 2011 deadline is NOT set in stone. I would, in fact, go further and predict that barring some unforeseen change in the operating environment we will almost definitely have a significant presence in Afghanistan for some time.

(Hat tip: Ricks)