Category: The Dish

Seattle, Washington, dawn.

This is taken from the front window of a U.S. military humvee, navigating Baghdad traffic. I’m assuming the unconventional driving is due to the need to keep moving and avoid ambushes or attacks. You can also see how such necessary precautions can nonetheless hardly endear the U.S. forces to the local population.

The truth behind Love God’s Way.

An atheist’s riposte to Kolakowski.

One word: a disgrace.

Today, 4.35 pm, Washington, D.C.

The Daily Star’s Michael Young has tended to downplay the odds of a new civil war in Lebanon in the past. He’s not so sure any more. The good news, however, is that Hezbollah has not been doing too well lately:

The last six months have been a period of meltdown for Hizbullah. The party has been neutralized in the South, at least for the moment; its reputation in the Arab world lies in tatters because it is seen as an extension of Iran; domestically, Hizbullah is viewed more than ever as a menace to national coexistence and civil peace; few Lebanese, other than Hizbullah’s own, believe that its insistence on participating in the political process means respect for the latter’s rules, free from foreign interests; and none of Nasrallah’s political rivals trust him anymore.

Read the whole thing.

"Religion is man’s way of accepting life as an inevitable defeat. That it is not an inevitable defeat is a claim that cannot be defended in good faith. One can, of course, disperse one’s life over the contingencies of every day, but even then it is only a ceaseless and desperate desire to live, and finally a regret that one has not lived. One can accept life, and accept it, at the same time, as a defeat only if one accepts that there is a sense beyond that which is inherent in human history – if, in other words, one accepts the order of the sacred.

A hypothetical world from which the sacred had been swept away would admit of only two possibilities: vain fantasy that recognizes itself as such, or immediate satisfaction which exhausts itself. It would leave only the choice proposed by Baudelaire, between lovers of prostitutes and lovers of clouds: those who know only the satisfactions of the moment and are therefore contemptible, and those who lose themselves in otiose imaginings, and are therefore contemptible. Everything is then contemptible, and there is no more to be said," – Leszek Kolakowski, "Modernity on Endless Trial."

(Painting: Mathis Grunewal.)

Scott Horton reflects on Frederick Douglass, Edward Covey and … Donald Rumsfeld.

"If you ask me what should have been done in the villages in Lebanon during this war, I think Israel wasn’t harsh enough. Now, I’m not right-wing, I’m not…I just think that if we are in a war…it’s like, if you play with fire, people get burned. There’s nothing you can do about it. These whole villages, they were empty, just filled with Hezbollah terrorists. They should have been totally wiped off the map. Except Israel left them standing. Many of our soldiers were killed because of that, so Israel wouldn’t be blamed after the war for war crimes and destroying civilian houses," – an Israeli soldier interviewed by Michael Totten about his actions in last year’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.