The Dish

This is white music:

James Poulos springboards off my post on Pat Buchanan:

The culture wars are the playing out of a fateful, momentous, confusing, and difficult argument in America: an argument over what culture is. Not a culture, not the culture, but culture itself — the foundational, necessary elements and structures of social order. Go back to James Madison and you see a certainty that American social order, including our political order, requires a religious culture. Even then, that certainty wasn’t so certain that it hadn’t to be spoken. Things have only gotten more explicit and less certain since then. But one thing is clear. The anti-culture which the counterculture spawned or gave the opportunity of a lifetime used race/power as simply a weapon against the real foe of those against culture — religion/authority. And the foolish white racists of yesterday failed to realize that choosing to fight over the former meant choosing to lose the fight over the latter.

Jonah Leher explains the brain's reading pathways and applies this to e-reading:

This research suggests that the act of reading observes a gradient of fluency. Familiar sentences printed in Helvetica activate the ventral route, while difficult prose filled with jargon and fancy words and printed in an illegible font require us to use the slow dorsal route. Here's my rampant speculation (and it's pure speculation because no one has brought a Kindle into a scanner): new reading formats (such as computer screens or E-Books) might initially require a bit more dorsal processing, as our visual cortex adjusts to the image.

(One has to remember that printed books have been evolving to fit the peculiar sensory habits of the brain for hundreds of years – they're a pretty perfect cultural product.) But then, after a few years, the technology is tweaked and our brain adjusts and the new reading format is read with the same ventral fluency as words on a page.

The larger point is that most complaints about E-Books and Kindle apps boil down to a single problem: they don't feel as "effortless" or "automatic" as old-fashioned books. But here's the wonderful thing about the human brain: give it a little time and practice and it can make just about anything automatic. We excel at developing new habits. Before long, digital ink will feel just as easy as actual ink.

Jason Jones and Tim Greenberg talk about their revelatory trip last spring:

Daily Show Goes to Iran from sahar sarshar on Vimeo.

Mark Johnson reports:

56 days .?.?. 55 days .?.?. 54 days .?.?. Chelsea Caudle began signing her text messages this summer with a countdown. At 14 years old, she knew no better way to express what was coming. Day Zero was to be Oct. 7, the day Dad left for Army basic training in Fort Jackson, S.C. He was moving 950 miles from their home in Watertown, 950 miles from Mom. He was leaving, even though Mom was sick with ovarian cancer. Even though he had been at her side through two long, miserable rounds of chemotherapy. Even though she now faced the likelihood of a third. In fact, Dad was leaving because Mom was sick.

In March, he was laid off from his job as a raw materials coordinator for a plastics company called PolyOne, where he'd worked for 20 years. His severance package had provided several months' salary, but by August the paychecks were winding down. Soon the cost of his family health coverage was going to triple, then a few months after that, nearly triple again. They needed coverage so Mom could fight her cancer. Dad's solution: a four-year hitch in the Army.

(Hat tip: Zaid Jilani)

Your weekly dose of retro Internet camp (slightly NSFW):

Fareed Zakaria says China is:

Almost every country in the Western world entered the crisis ill prepared. Governments were spending too much money and running high deficits, so when they had to spend massively to stabilize the economy, deficits zoomed into the stratosphere…China entered the crisis in an entirely different position. It was running a budget surplus and had been raising interest rates to tamp down excessive growth. Its banks had been reining in consumer spending and excessive credit. So when the crisis hit, the Chinese government could adopt textbook policies to jump-start growth. It could lower interest rates, raise government spending, ease up on credit, and encourage consumers to start spending. Having been disciplined during the fat years, Beijing could now ease up during the lean ones.

More on the American and Chinese relationship in the latest Economist.

Today on the Dish, Sarah Palin injected herself into a congressional race and racist BNP leader Nick Griffin got his day in the sun. (Most were not impressed with Griffin, but the BBC also caught some flak.)

We saw some horrible homophobia out of Guam and Uganda, the CDC ignored gay boys for HPV protection, and NOM is starting to lose it. (Tom Cruise lost it long ago.) Mark Lynch reported from Palestine, Andrew Sprung made sense of the Afghan debate, and Lee Seigel took his Cheney hate a bit too far.

Our conversation on black American culture continued here, here, here, here, here, and here. Our thread on Human Rights Watch continued here, here, here, and here.

— C.B.

A reader writes:

The US has a much more potent lever than military aid – its pretty much automatic veto in the Security Council. The whole Goldstone affair has the Israeli government running scared: none of them want to be the first to be arrested in Europe, to which they love traveling (and staying in highly expensive hotels at the taxpayers' expense – this is a recent scandal over here). All the US has to do, to get Israel to move, is to hint that the veto is no longer automatic. No pariah state, which Israel is much as I dislike admitting so, can survive without support of at least one superpower; we can find ourselves under sanctions faster than Iran, and they will hurt more, to boot. So, no need to bring out the main gun. A side battery will do.

Rebecca Abou-Chedid is one of the Arab-American J-Street donors vilified by former AIPAC staffer Lenny Ben-David. She writes:

It is possible to be both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, not out of some blanket support for either government, but out of a sincere belief that peace is in both people's best interests.  I hold that belief as a result of years of work within the Arab and Jewish American communities, working in partnerships not just with J Street but also with such groups as Americans for Peace Now, Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, and Israel Policy Forum. I have traveled to the region and remain humbled and inspired by the courage and tenacity of those Israelis and Palestinians who refuse to submit to the cynicism or pessimism this conflict so often demands. The reason J Street causes such fury among certain detractors often has nothing to do with its policy positions. These people are angry because the political climate has shifted in a way that they no longer understand or control.

The generation that elected President Obama is not interested in being divided based on religion or ethnic heritage. We are not interested in a zero-sum game. We believe our elected officials must play a leadership role in brokering a two-state solution to this conflict, and that Arab and Jewish Americans must work together to support them. How can anyone profess to believe in a two-state solution, in which Israelis and Palestinians will live side by side, if they view with suspicion Arab and Jewish Americans working together to get there?

She has a point, no? What she doesn't quite grasp is that many in AIPAC are sadly dedicated to "war for ever." Spencer Ackerman defends Abou-Chedid here.