Author: Andrew Sullivan

In the surreal twists and turns of British politics this past week, Gordon Brown’s attempt to seize an opportunity for a Labour-Liberal coalition was one of the most startling. It felt like something perfectly out of Lord Mandelson’s playbook – Machiavellian, ruthless, and based on an abiding hatred of all things Tory. But it seems to have backfired:

Some Lib Dem negotiators were unimpressed by the demeanour of the Labour negotiators, claiming they showed no real interest in a deal.

The attitude of Labour backbenchers has also undermined the pro-Labour forces inside the Lib Dems, as they face the reality that a coalition, needed to force through a deficit reduction programme, will be unstable for as long as two to three years.

Many Labour MPs, including those from northern heartlands and Scotland, seem to be furious that they were not consulted on the deal. One party member close to a leadership campaign said: “The party is not a plaything of Lord Mandelson.”

The Tory proposal – to offer the Lib-Dems a referendum on Alternative Voting – seems a genuine and real concession that is about as far as the party could go without splitting in half. So Cameron lives on as a potential prime minister. Here’s hoping he gets there sooner rather than later.

By the way, if you want an almost perfect flavor of the debate in Britain right now, watch the Youtube above. It’s a rare moment in which private passions burst out in public – and helps you understand why Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s legendary press enforcer, is regarded by so many as a noxious influence in political life in Britain.

Steinglass counters Harris:

How many Westerners can Sam Harris find who defend female genital excision? There basically aren’t any, and indeed the overwhelming majority of those who denounce female genital excision are secular Western leftists, precisely those whom Harris would presumably denounce as moral relativists. The defense of female genital excision is carried out by Muslim men and women who live in the countries where it is practiced. And here’s the key: Western governments have had no trouble whatsoever enacting or enforcing bans on FGM on their own territory, while Western anti-FGM activists have had only moderate and gradual success in fighting the practice through propaganda in the countries where it is practiced. And neither of those things would change one whit if we decided that we had some kind of science-based morality in addition to the Western rationalist secular moral tradition that has been getting along quite well over the past several hundred years.

I am a big believer in science. That’s why I think it shouldn’t attempt to generate knowledge in fields where it can’t generate knowledge.

328 Iraqis were killed in sectarian attacks last month – around the same number as in April 2009. Yesterday was particularly bloody with over a hundred Shiite deaths from Sunni or Qaeda terrorists. The world barely noticed, but this does not sound promising:

Today's attacks stood out from other spikes in bloodshed over the past year. They were marked by a large number of precise bombings and assassinations, in all corners of the country.

Allawi is warning of worse to come:

"This conflict will not remain within the borders of Iraq. It will spill over and it has the potential to reach the world at large, not just neighbouring countries. Now Iraq is at centre stage in the region. But it is boiling with problems, it is stagnant and it can go either way. I feel that we are not done and that the international community has failed this country."

Matthew Wald spotlights some cool innovation on the biofuels front:

The company, Joule Unlimited of Cambridge, Mass., has developed several patented gene-altered organisms that absorb sunlight and carbon dioxide and combine these into hydrocarbons. The organisms – basically single-celled plants – live in a panel that vaguely resembles a solar photovoltaic one.

Julia Ioffe profiles Andrey Ternovskiy, the teen from Moscow who crated Chatroulette:

[Ternovskiy] sees school—and college—as a waste of time. “The last three years at school, I haven’t done anything,” he says. “I just can’t make myself. There’s so much interesting stuff in the world, and I have to sit there with textbooks?”

By “the world,” of course, Ternovskiy means the Internet, which is also where most of his friends are. His closest confidant is a Russian immigrant named Kirill Gura, who lives in Charleston, West Virginia. Every night for the past five years, Ternovskiy has turned on his computer, found Kirill on MSN Messenger, and talked to him until one of them fell asleep. “He’s a real friend,” Ternovskiy says.

Sitting in his carefully engineered workspace—a comfortable chair and two giant monitors placed at the precise distance that Wikipedia says prevents eyestrain and a humped posture—Ternovskiy says that he sees the computer as “one hundred per cent my window into the world.” He doesn’t seek much else. “I always believed that computer might be that thing that I only need, that I only need that thing to survive,” he says. “It might replace everything.”

Kottke highlights another paragraph.

"I was also going to give a graduation speech in Arizona this weekend. But with my accent, I was afraid they would try to deport me," – Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Friedersdorf hopes for one:

In my experience, the average Tea Party adherent doesn’t have a blanket distrust of institutions — and far from it. He reveres the American military, imagines that American soldiers can successfully establish a functioning democracy in Iraq, doesn’t object when even a Commander-in-Chief he loathes invokes sweeping powers to fight terrorism, generally trusts the criminal justice system to effect fair outcomes, affords police officers the benefit of the doubt when they arrest Harvard professors or suspected drug dealers or especially suspected terrorists, believes that local government officials in Arizona can enforce federal immigration law without unduly impinging on the civil liberties of legal residents and American citizens, wishes that Christian churches played a more influential role in American life, etc. I don’t mean to imply that Tea Party attendees are uniform in their beliefs — there is more intellectual diversity than is commonly supposed — but what I’ve just described are all commonly held views.