Category: The Dish

Here’s something I didn’t know:

On many Ivy League campuses, [Asian Americans] have come to dominate evangelical groups. At Yale, 90 percent of the Campus Crusade for Christ members are Asian American; in the 1980s, the same chapter was 100 percent white. In fact, the growing presence of Asian-Americans on elite campuses may be the single largest demographic factor in evangelicalism’s ascent at places like Yale and Harvard.

There may be more evangelicals at Harvard today than at any time since the seventeenth century. (Hat tip: Evangelical Outpost.)

Benedict moves the church to the forefront of the climate change debate. Crunchy cons, rejoice.

Nick Gillespie reminds us what "casual heroism" looks like. You can almost forgive the guy for inventing the moonwalk for this:

When the Nazis marched into eastern France, he fled with family members to the southwest and changed his last name to Marceau to hide his Jewish origins.

With his brother Alain, Marceau became active in the French Resistance, altering children’s identity cards by changing birth dates to trick the Nazis into thinking they were too young to be deported. Because he spoke English, he was recruited to be a liaison officer with Gen. George S. Patton’s army.

His father was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944.

"Yes, I cried for him," Marceau said. But he said he also thought of the others killed.

"Among those kids was maybe an Einstein, a Mozart, somebody who (would have) found a cancer drug," he told reporters in 2000. "That is why we have a great responsibility."

The Christianists have had enough with this country:

Lyrics:

Why should God bless America?
She’s forgotten he exists
And has turned her back
On everything that made her what she is

Why should God stand beside her
Through the night with the light from his hand?
God have mercy on America
Forgive her sin and heal our land

The courts ruled prayer out of our schools
In June of ‘62
Told the children “you are your own God now
So you can make the rules”
O say can you see what that choice
Has cost us to this day
America, one nation under God, has gone astray

They lean; GQ caves.

Am I the only one to be inspired by the sound of laughter here? This tin-pot theo-fascist is being laughed at by students at one of the country’s major universities because he is denying a fact of human nature. Perhaps the invite has a silver lining after all.

Walter Benjamin gets re-mixed – into verse.

From rural Japan, straight female culture meets post-gay culture:

Emi was totally earnest. "You know I do kind of have a type," she whispered. "I know," I whispered back…

"No, I mean I have a physical type," she said and put a hand on my forearm to prevent my smile from turning into a laugh. "Okay?" she asked.

"Okay, go ahead. I won’t make fun of you," I lied.

"My husband should be tall, over six feet, with a round face and maybe a," and here she patted an imaginary beer belly, "and… completely serious … and …," she scanned my face and must have detected amusement, but went on anyway, "and he could be a little," and here she patted her own back, "….hairy…," silence, "you know, like a bear."

This has got to go down well with all the lefties at Columbia:

"We don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country. In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who has told you that we have it."

I haven’t gone off on the Columbia invite because it seems superfluous. I take a very broad view of free speech rights in America, but I would never have invited a dictator and religious extremist like Ahmadinejad. So far, it seems his usual blend of glibness, guile and gall is exposing him to ridicule as it should. If there are no gays in his country, why is he hanging so many of them? But I wonder: would Columbia ever invite a right-wing extremist with the same views as Ahmadinejad on women, gays, Israel and the Holocaust? Or do you have to be a brown-skinned, terrorist-enabling, nuclear-proliferating, certifiable nut-job to get the invite?

A reader writes:

This is a very interesting nugget. Let me venture that nobody I know believes that negotiations with the Iranians alone will achieve the desired objective. But NPod’s dismissive attitude about negotiations (which echoes much of what I read in a certain corner of the press) misunderstands why such steps are important. If we look at Augustine’s notion of just war and carry it forward, the view has always been that a party who wages a just war must have exhausted the possibility of a peaceful resolution of his grievance first. This requires raising your grievance, presenting it firmly and convincingly, and giving clear warning that you view the grievance as a matter of the utmost gravity which will push you to arms if unsatisfied. Doing this puts you in a position to defend your war-making on moral grounds – which is very important. It also puts you in a position to build an alliance. It’s not remotely a laughing matter. The Bush Doctrine seems to be to downplay diplomacy and to play up the threat of attack as a justification for pre-emptive strike. But the problem is that when you invoke this doctrine falsely once, people will disbelieve you the second time.  They will come to brand you as an aggressor and hate you. So policies that NPod and Dubya feel are virile are in fact dullwitted and make us much less safe. 

On this as on so many things Machiavelli is much smarter than them.

In the Prince, he explains that a smart prince doesn’t crave being loved by his people; indeed, it’s fine if he’s feared.  But he must at all costs avoid being hated, because then he’s a target and both he and his people are put seriously at risk.  Being in the right and being viewed by the world community as being in the right are extremely valuable things; people may not love you, but they will understand what you’re doing and they’re unlikely to hate you.  Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Reagan all understood this very well.  Dubya and NPod don’t get it.  And that’s a good part of our current dilemma.