The Dish

David Kilcullen, among the best military strategists out there, lays it out:

Only a legitimately elected Afghan president can enact reforms, so at the very least we need to see a genuine run-off election or an emergency national council, called a loya jirga, before winter. Once a legitimate president emerges, we need to see immediate action from him on a publicly announced reform program, developed in consultation with Afghan society and enforced by international monitors.

[…]

If we see no genuine progress on such steps toward government responsibility, the United States should “Afghanize,” draw down troops and prepare to mitigate the inevitable humanitarian disaster that will come when the Kabul government falls to the Taliban — which, in the absence of reform, it eventually and deservedly will.

Ackerman parses Kilcullen's and the Galbraith's articles.

Grim news of the latest battle.

A pretty important development. You know, the paper with the boobs on page 3.

Peter W. Galbraith, former overseer of Afghanistan's elections for the UN, who was fired because he wanted actions taken against the election fraud that occurred has a devastating piece in the WaPo. Money quote:

Afghanistan's presidential election, held Aug. 20, should have been a milestone in the country's transition from 30 years of war to stability and democracy. Instead, it was just the opposite. As many as 30 percent of Karzai's votes were fraudulent, and lesser fraud was committed on behalf of other candidates. In several provinces, including Kandahar, four to 10 times as many votes were recorded as voters actually cast. The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners.

Read it all. The entire counter-insurgency option is premised on a credible government to fight counter-insurgency for. We just lost one. This matters – and makes the choice all the more excruciating, and a swifter exit much more reasonable.

Scientific American:

In sum, the authors suggest that, because love activates a long-term perspective that elicits global processing, it should also promote creativity and impede analytic thinking. In contrast, inasmuch as sex activates a short-term perspective that elicits local processing, it should also promote analytic thinking and impede creative thinking.

I know this is tangential to this broader argument, but if fucking has made me more analytic, it seems to me to be defeating one of its core purposes.

I have had sex out of love and it's an amazing, wonderful, transformative thing. At its height, it is the most overwhelming thing I have ever experienced. I have also had sex in my life largely as a way to escape this fucking brain in my head, that won't stop constantly analyzing and thinking. I have had sex for these reasons as well – so I can gain a few blissful moments when I do not think at all. The relief of this is indescribable and, for me at least, an element of mental and psychological health.

I recall one marathon twelve-hour session of passion many years ago now. It was only afterwards that I realized I had barely had a single trace of an analytic thought for the longest period I could then remember. I was never happier. As I finally collapsed into my lover's arms with the final orgasm that drained every last drop of desire or need from my body and soul, I understood for the first time why the French call coming "le petit mort". It can be the emptying of self entirely. Which is why sex is so close at times to the presence of the divine, and reflects and incarnates God in ways few other things can so easily. We are more animal and more divine in sex than in any other activity.

The ordeal of consciousness is at times oppressive. To leave that consciousness and yet stay so vividly alive is one of sex's great wonders. Love is deeper than that; friendship is deeper still. But I know nothing that God has given us – save psilocybin – that gives us this divine, if fleeting, parole from a vale of tears.

Macy Halford quotes one of Byron's letters to his friend and clergyman Francis Hodgson "trying to convince the Reverend of the ridiculousness of religion." From September 13, 1811:

God would have made His will known without books, considering how very few could read them when Jesus of Nazareth lived, had it been His pleasure to ratify any peculiar mode of worship. As to your immortality, if people are to live, why die? And our carcases, which are to rise again, are they worth raising? I hope, if mine is, that I shall have a better pair of legs that I have moved on these two-and-twenty years, or I shall be sadly behind in the squeeze into Paradise.

Steve Mirsky digs into the science:

A part of the answer may lie in what’s called implicit social cognition, which involves the deep-rooted assumptions we all carry around and even act on without realizing it. Harvard University psychologist Mahzarin Banaji is a leader in implicit social cognition research. She excavates the hidden beliefs people hold by measuring how fast they make value judgments when shown a rapid-fire succession of stimuli, such as photographs of faces.

At a talk she gave in October 2008 to a group of science journalists, Banaji discussed research she did with Thierry Devos, now at San Diego State University, that examined bias against Asians. They found that volunteers linked white Americans more strongly than Asian-Americans with, well, America. Banaji and Devos then decided to do what even they thought was a “bizarre” study: they had people gauge the “American-ness” of famous Asian-Americans, such as Connie Chung and tennis player Michael Chang, versus European whites, such as Hugh Grant.

The study found that white Europeans are more “American” than are nonwhite Americans in most minds.

McMinnville, Oregon, 6 am

Yes, I'm aware this is a comedy sketch. You only have to read the comments on the YouTube page. But if you reveal the spoof in advance, you can spoil the joke a little and so I did my best to leave it open-ended. It's funnier if you think for a minute it could be real, but of course you realize it isn't a little way through the skit.

Sebastian Horseley has slept with 1300 prostitutes at a cost of £115,000. He says he doesn't want prostitution legalized:

The problem with normal sex is that it leads to kissing and pretty soon you’ve got to talk to them. Once you know someone well the last thing you want to do is screw them. I like to give, never to receive; to have the power of the host, not the obligation of the guest. I can stop writing this and within two minutes I can be chained, in the arms of a whore. I know I am going to score and I know they don’t really want me. And within 10 minutes I am back writing.

What I hate are meaningless and heartless one-night stands where you tell all sorts of lies to get into bed with a woman you don’t care for.  The worst things in life are free. Value seems to need a price tag. How can we respect a woman who doesn’t value herself? When I was young I used to think it wasn’t who you wanted to have sex with that was important, but who you were comfortable with socially and spiritually. Now I know that’s rubbish. It’s who you want to have sex with that’s important. In the past I have deceived the women I have been with. You lie to two people in your life; your partner and the police. Everyone else gets the truth.

(Hat tip: 3QD)