Tag: Premium

Torture’s Partisan Divide

by Dish Staff

It’s massive:

Torture Partisan

Jane Mayer fears that “torture is becoming just another partisan issue”:

This wasn’t always the case—it was Ronald Reagan who signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture, in 1988. But polls show both a growing acceptance of the practice and a widening divide along party lines. “It’s becoming a lot like the death penalty,” [political science professor Darius] Rejali said.

The 1975 Church Committee report, which was conducted following revelations of, among other things, covert operations to assassinate foreign leaders, was, until now, the best-known public airing of C.I.A. practices. According to Loch K. Johnson, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia, who was a special assistant to Senator Frank Church, its findings were broadly accepted across the political spectrum. “No one challenged it,” he said.

She argues “there was a way to address the matter that might have avoided much of the partisan trivialization”:

In a White House meeting in early 2009, Greg Craig, President Obama’s White House Counsel, recommended the formation of an independent commission. Nearly every adviser in the room endorsed the idea, including such national-security hawks as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, and the President’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Leon Panetta, the C.I.A. director at the time, also supported it.

Obama, however, said that he didn’t want to seem to be taking punitive measures against his predecessor, apparently because he still hoped to reach bipartisan agreement on issues such as closing Guantánamo.

And look at how well that turned out. Allahpundit, looking at the above chart, ponders the partisan split:

Both sides are way more comfortable with sleep deprivation and hitting a prisoner than they are with sticking one in a de facto coffin for a week or rectally feeding hunger-strikers. You can tease out a certain logic to that. Practices that the average joe can relate to, like being slapped or deprived of sleep, are more acceptable; practices that are more baroque, like trapping a guy in a box for days on end, or that involve some sort of sexual humiliation, like forced nudity or threats of sexual violence, are out of the ordinary and more likely to be seen as sadistic. (Note how there’s more support in both parties for actual violence against a detainee than threatening to use physical or sexual violence against him. It’s the “sexual” part of the question that produces that result, I bet.)

The one outlier is waterboarding, another baroque practice but one that’s acceptable to many Republicans and a bit more acceptable to Democrats than the box is. Why is that? Maybe it’s because waterboarding’s become familiar over time after so much public debate about it. Maybe it’s because GOPers know it’s closely linked to Bush and Cheney and feel a partisan tug to defend it. Or maybe it’s that lots of righties remain unconvinced that being waterboarded is as terrible as it’s supposed to be, at least compared to being enclosed in a coffin-sized crate for days.

As things stand, Steve M. bets that the next Republican president will torture:

I don’t know if the gloves are going to come off again on the first day of the next GOP presidency, but if we have a Sidney siege with a Republican in the White House and any of the perpetrators are captured alive, it seems likely to me that the waterboarding equipment is coming out of mothballs.

Waldman wants the question raised during the next primary:

My guess is that if asked directly, the GOP presidential candidates would say, “That’s all in the past.” But at the very least, we ought to get them on record now making clear whether they would ever consider using torture again.

A Mixed Bag For Marijuana

by Dish Staff

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 29: A man purchases medical marijuana,

Congress’s spending bill interferes with the legalization of pot in DC. But Josh Voorhees focuses on another provision in the bill, which “stops the Justice Department from spending a dime to prosecute patients or medical marijuana dispensaries that are acting in accordance with state law but running afoul of federal ones”:

In shear terms of people impacted, the medical provision will dwarf that of the more publicized D.C. ban, even assuming the latter survives a potential legal challenge. The District is home to roughly 640,000 people; California, one of 23 states where medical pot is legal, is home to more than 38 million. Forcing the federal government to respect state medical marijuana laws has long been a goal of the legalization movement, but one that had previously proved unattainable.

He finds it telling that “a sweeping provision that could fundamentally reshape how the federal government treats medical marijuana slipped through with hardly a peep”:

That just goes to show how far the battle lines have shifted in the favor of the pro-pot crowd and suggests that, in spite of the potential setback in the District itself, the future for their side in Washington is a brighter one.

Jon Walker isn’t as excited:

Having Congress not longer actively opposing medical marijuana is a big victory for the reform movement, but not a complete solution. The provision is only a short-term and incomplete fix. Medical marijuana is still technically illegal under federal law which will continue to causes issues with things like taxes for medical marijuana business. The provision also only applies to this one year funding bill.

David Borden unpacks the new rules:

What will this mean on the ground? It should mean that DEA and other branches of the Dept. of Justice can no longer threaten medical marijuana providers (or more theoretically, patients) with arrest or prosecution, and that landlords should no longer face the threat of asset forfeiture for property being rented to medical marijuana businesses. But the precise language, which focuses on states’ implementating medical marijuana systems, could be argued as applying more narrowly, giving reassurance to state officials about their participation but not going further. Another concern is that a prosecutor could argue, for example, that a given marijuana business is not operating in strict accordance with a state’s law. Our perspective in the movement is that that determination should be up to state authorities, not federal, but that’s not necessarily the perspective of federal law enforcement. Those are some reasons why it remains to be seen just how thoroughly and reliably the protections that the new law provides will turn out to be, and these questions are being debated right now.

Meanwhile, Walker urges Obama to intervene on DC’s behalf:

If the Obama administration uses their power to move marijuana to Schedule II or III, this legal impediment on D.C. taxing and regulating marijuana would theoretically be removed. Potentially, there might still be a legal fight over whether raw marijuana would count as a tetrahydrocannabinols derivative, but one can argue that legal term is meant to apply only to newly-discovered and potentially dangerous synthetic tetrahydrocannabinols derivatives, which are often being sold as “incense.” Once again, if both the D.C. Council and the Obama administration share support for this interruption of the law, any legal challenge is unlikely to succeed.]

And Dylan Matthews, who voted for legalization in DC, wants his vote counted:

It’s easy to dismiss the importance of ensuring marijuana legalization in DC. Pot policy tends to be treated as a laughing matter, and DC is admittedly the third smallest state/quasi-state by population. But it’s still, substantively, among the most important riders in the CRomnibus. DC had a higher marijuana possession arrest rate in 2010than any other state (perhaps understandably, as it’s the only city-state): 846 arrests per 100,000 residents, which works out to about 5,091 arrests total.

That’s over 5,000 people a year paying fines, doing community service, and going through probation; it’s over 5,000 people who’ll forever have to check the box on job applications asking if they’ve ever been arrested, among many other consequences for employment, government benefits, child custody, and more. DC also has the second biggest gap between black and white arrests of any state: 1,489 arrests per 100,000 black residents versus 174 per 100,000 white residents. Black Washingtonians are over eight times likelier to be arrested for the same crime, when there’s no evidence of any racial gaps in actual marijuana usage.

(Photo: A man purchases medical marijuana, the first legal sale, at Capital City Care in Washington, DC on July 29, 2013. By Linda Davidson / The Washington Post via Getty Images)

“Cat Lovers Killed Cat Fancy”

by Dish Staff

That’s what Abraham Riesman concludes in his post-mortem for the magazine:

In their defense, they had no idea they were doing it. But in recent years, the nature of cat adoration (and I must offer full disclosure here: I am the parent of two cats) has changed 2078985468504005137f9404728566c1radically. Though Cat Fancy tried to adapt, it never totally broke free from its origins in a different era of cat enthusiasm. To understand the seismic shift in cat culture, you can start by picking apart Cat Fancy‘s name. It used to be much more than a whimsical reference to the enjoyment of felines. When the magazine launched in 1965, animal lovers were very familiar with something called “the cat fancy.” The term referred to a connoisseurlike approach to cats: following professional cat shows, maintaining directories of cat breeders, and recognizing the importance of purebred bloodlines. “Back then, the people who had all the knowledge tended to be the people who were showing cats, breeding cats, everything like that,” said Melissa Kauffman, senior editorial director for I-5. …

[R]eaders of Cat Fancy in its early decades would likely be aghast at the shape of today’s cat passions. Modern feline icons like Grumpy Cat and Lil Bub are mutts with genetic deformities. They wouldn’t have made it past the front door at a Golden Age cat show. And their many public appearances are filled with fans who would disdain anyone who gets a cat from a breeder rather than a shelter.

Here’s what Cat Fancy‘s replacement, Catster, looks like:

https://twitter.com/BoingBoing/status/540688579933241345

Riesman again:

But beyond the covers, what will Catster the magazine be? Much of that won’t be clear until the first issue hits stands in February, but all evidence indicates that it will be extremely photo-oriented, very lighthearted, filled with lists and confessionals, and committed to treating cat ownership as a lifestyle rather than a hobby or a medical burden.

“Catster is for the cat-selfie generation,” Huey-Steiner said. “It’s for people who consider cats an integral part of their social lives. It’s about fun things and knowing that cats rule the roost.” That means lists like “19 Crazy Cat Superstitions” and “Litter-Box Accidents Waiting to Happen,” as well as pieces like “How to Cat-ify Your Cubicle.” There will still be some breed information and veterinary advice, but neither will be a major focus. And then there’s the celebrity aspect. “We want to capitalize on the role that cats play in the lives of celebrities, whether that’s somebody like a Taylor Swift and how she talks about her cats or someone else,” Huey-Steiner said. “You’d never see that in Cat Fancy.”

(Image of Cat Fancy‘s cover from February 1969)

The History Of French Self-Hatred

by Dish Staff

Alexander Stille describes Éric Zemmour’s book, Le Suicide Français, as “a wildly over-the-top broadside condemnation of everything that has happened in the past fifty years, such as birth control, abortion, student protests, sexual liberation, women’s rights, gay rights, immigration from Africa, American consumer capitalism, left-wing intellectualism, the European Union”:

In Zemmour’s view, both the traditional French left and right (really, everyone but the French far right) have, through a mixture of blindness and cowardice, allowed for the dismantling of a national edifice based on paternal authority. It is highly revealing that Zemmour uses the term “virilité,” or virility, some twenty-three times in his five-hundred page book, suggesting a certain fixation.

The popular success of “Le Suicide Français” is in keeping with a well-established tradition: it takes its place on a long shelf of books that have declared the decline or death of France.

As early as 1783, as Sean M. Quinlan notes, in “The Great Nation in Decline,” the French began to churn out tracts like one which laments that “a flagging, weak and less vivacious generation has replaced, without succeeding, that brilliant [Frankish] race, those men of combat and hunting, whose bodies were more robust, cleaner and of greater height than those of today’s civilized peoples.” The French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, in 1871, set off a spate of self-flagellation, with writers decrying a declining birth rate, an inferior education system, and moral bankruptcy. Although nostalgists like Zemmour consider the late nineteenth century a golden age, when France emerged as an imperial power and a center of cultural greatness, his counterparts in that period saw a cesspool of effeminacy and decline. One of the big books of 1892 was “Degeneration,” whose author, Max Nordau, was Hungarian but lived most of his life in Paris. He excoriates Émile Zola and writes that the Impressionists can only be understood in terms of “hysteria and degeneracy.”

Stille tries to put things in perspective:

France is no longer an empire, but it is a prosperous medium-sized country with an extremely high standard of living. It is no longer the world’s cultural center, but it has far more influence than most societies. France remains among the top twenty countries by virtually all measures of the World Bank’s Human Development Index. Life expectancy in France has increased from fifty to nearly eighty-two years in the past century, even as France’s global role has shrunk. Aging population, declining birth rates, slower growth, a more skeptical attitude toward authority, and greater gender equality—those are all typical of advanced, post-industrial societies, not unique to France.

The Depravity Of Dick Cheney

Perhaps the only saving grace of this sociopath formerly in high office is that he understands that his legacy could well be as a war criminal unlike any in American history before him. That’s my only explanation for why he has to be out there day after day, year after year, attacking his successor, lambasting America’s return to civilization, and insisting that hanging people from shackles, freezing them to near-death, near-drowning them so that their abdomens are distended with water, anally raping them, breaking their limbs, and keeping them awake so long they hallucinated … is not somehow torture. Ask yourself: have you ever met someone who believes that? Outside the professional criminal classes, that is.

And in his response today to the voluminous and undisputed evidence supplied by the CIA’s own internal documents, he has nothing specific or factual to say that can undermine any of it. He just insists, like a dad lost on a car trip, that he alone knows he’s not lost, whatever the map or GPS says. His best talking point is that those who authorized and committed the torture were not interviewed by the committee – implying this was because of bias. But this is transparently false. Six months into the investigation, the attorney general announced his own study into CIA torture techniques. Here is Senator Feinstein’s account of what happened next:

The committee’s Vice Chairman Kit Bond withdrew the minority’s participation in the study, citing the attorney general’s expanded investigation as the reason. The Department of Justice refused to coordinate its investigation with the Intelligence Committee’s review. As a result, possible interviewees could be subject to additional liability if they were interviewed. The CIA, citing the attorney general’s investigation, would not instruct its employees to participate in our interviews. (Source: classified CIA internal memo, February 26, 2010).

In any case, there were plenty of previous interviews with CIA torturers, including from the CIA’s own internal investigation, there was a formal CIA response to all the charges (highly unpersuasive because they have to argue against their own records), and, so far as I know, interviewing them all over again is still possible. Come to think of it, why doesn’t the committee take that up again under GOP leadership, if their perspective will allegedly alter the conclusions?

But in the Cheney interview, there is nothing faintly that rational. He is behaving like a cornered man. On what possible grounds does he dismiss 6.3 million pages of documentation from the CIA’s own records as “full of crap”? The CIA had a chance to rebut every one of the conclusions with other documents and failed to. This is preposterous as well as slanderous to the extraordinary work behind this remarkable report. But the most revealing parts of the interview were the following, it seems to me. Todd asked Cheney at one point what he believed the meaning of torture is, after citing the rectal hydration issue (which seems to have upset more people than any other technique). And this is what Cheney said:

I’ll tell you what my definition of torture is: what nineteen guys armed with airline tickets and boxcutters did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11.

Later, when confronted with an example of a human being suspended by his wrists from shackles so he could barely touch the floor for 22 hours a day for two weeks, Cheney refused to say that that wasn’t torture. Instead he repeated:

Torture is what the al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11

What I take from these statements is that the torture program was, for Cheney, partly an amateur thug’s idea of how you get intelligence, but partly also simply a means of revenge. Yes: revenge. This was a torture program set up in order to vent rage and inflict revenge. It was torture designed to be as brutal to terror suspects as 19 men on 9/11 were to Americans. Tit-for-tat. Our torture in return for their torture; their innocent victims in return for ours. It was a program that has no place in a civilized society.

He was then asked about the 26 people whom the CIA admits were tortured by mistake. One of them was even frozen to death. A sane and rational and decent human being, who presided over the program that did this, might say: “The decision to torture was an extremely agonizing one, but I still believe defensible. But of course the torture of innocent people is horrifying. I deeply regret the chaos and amateurism of the program in its early phases.”

So what did Cheney actually say? When confronted with the instance of Rahman Gul, the individual tortured to death, Todd asked what the US owed these torture victims. Cheney actually said this:

The problem I have is with all the folks we did release who ended up on the battlefield … I have no problem [with torturing innocent people] as long as we achieved our objective.

It doesn’t get any clearer than that. The man is a sociopath. He is a disgrace to his country. And he needs to be brought to justice.

A Long Distance Relationship … With Your Therapist

Joseph Burgo shares his experiences using telemedicine in his therapy practice:

No doubt it would be better if my clients and I were able to meet in my office week after week, me inviting them in from my waiting room at the beginning of each session and ushering them out through the exit door at the end. But for people who live in remote locations where qualified professional help is scarce or entirely unavailable, connecting with a therapist by Skype is often the best option. Over the last few years, I’ve worked with an American expat living in Japan, a Ukrainian émigré in Israel, and the scion of a wealthy family in Egypt. I’ve held Skype sessions with people located in remote corners of the United States, England, Australia, and other countries. They had few options for getting the help they needed. …

The legality of Skype therapy is a gray area because most state laws require the professional to hold a license in the state where the client resides. Because I was trained as a psychoanalyst, and psychoanalysis is not a regulated profession in most states, I skirt such licensing laws by offering my services in that capacity. Some therapists call themselves “life coaches” when they work across state lines; others simply ignore the law. The arrival of distance therapy and telemedicine is rapidly rendering state-by-state licensure impractical. As usual, the law lags far behind technical innovation.

Todd Essig points out drawbacks to Skype therapy:

Are being bodies together and technologically-mediated simulations of being bodies together functionally equivalent, at least for the purposes of the psychoanalytic psychotherapy practiced by both Burgo and me?

According to a soon to be published book by Gillian Isaacs Russell titled Screen Relations: The Limits of Computer-Mediated Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy the answer is a resounding no (disclosure: I wrote the Foreword for this fine volume). In fact, after this book hits the shelves patients and therapists alike will need to be attentive both to the obvious gains from screen relations based treatment and the inevitable losses. Russell effectively demolishes the myth of functional equivalence using her ethnographic study of therapists and patients who have experienced Skype therapy along with lab findings from cognitive and neuro-science, communication studies, infant observation, and human–computer interaction, as well as a deep dive into clinical theory,

According to Russell, in an exchange we had about the Burgo article, when you eliminate the experience of being bodies together you constrain and limit what is therapeutically possible to “‘states of mind’ rather than ‘states of being.’” As a result, reflective introspection gets narrowed. How reflective can one really be when talking to a dashboard iPhone on a long drive?

Previous Dish on telemedicine here. In other therapy news, Tina Rosenberg flags research on providing mental health care to those in developing nations:

Two years ago, I wrote about a research study in 2002 that provided group interpersonal therapy, led by college students and high school graduates with two weeks’ training, to depressed women in Ugandan villages. The treatment was so effective that six months after starting this therapy, only 6 percent of those treated still had major depression.

More recently, similar work has gone on in South Asia. In rural Rawalpindi, Pakistan, the Thinking Healthy Program taught basic cognitive behavioral therapy for only two days to female community health workers with a high school education. The trainees, called Lady Health Workers, then integrated the therapy into their regular visits with pregnant women and new mothers. … Six months later, only 3 percent of those treated were still depressed. The largest study was in Goa, India, where local people with no health background were given an eight-week course in interpersonal psychotherapy and worked with physicians to treat patients with mental health disorders. This, too, was very successful.

These studies were proof that depression could be treated in poor countries by lay people. Now these researchers are trying to figure out how to streamline these interventions to the minimum outlay of resources needed to maintain excellent results.

Lastly, some somewhat lighter fare – Amanda Bloom covers a popular podcast from comedian Paul Gilmartin:

Gilmartin, 51, is the creator and host of The Mental-Illness Happy Hour, a weekly two-hour trudge to the darkest—and most joyful—corners of the human condition. He records the podcast in his hometown of Los Angeles, and the show is built around interviews with celebrities, artists, therapists, and podcast listeners; anonymous surveys; and Gilmartin’s narration of his own struggles with depression, addiction, and overcoming sexual abuse. Thirty-five thousand people download the podcast each week, and some episodes—interviews he’s held with Marc Maron, Maria Bamford, and Adam Carolla, for example—have been downloaded more than 80,000 times. The Mental-Illness Happy Hour website is home to an active listener forum, and the show’s 200th episode aired on November 21.

The podcast serves as a place of community and affirmation for those who struggle with mental illness, including Gilmartin, who has been undergoing treatment for clinical depression since 1999 and has gained clarity on his own issues through talking with his guests and corresponding with his listeners. It was while interviewing comedian Danielle Koenig during episode 16 of the podcast that Gilmartin realized on-air that he had been molested by a neighbor as a young boy, and the revelation that he was a survivor of incest began its slow simmer while talking with radio personality Phil Hendrie on episode 59. …

Levity and humor also keep the podcast from being overwhelmingly heavy, and listeners can expect a dick joke every now and again, in between tales of binge eating, drug dealing and coping mechanisms.

Should Christians Say The Pledge Of Allegiance?

Tattered Flag

Benjamin Corey already was skeptical of the practice – but with what we now know about the United States engaging in torture, he answers the question with a forceful “no”:

When you’ve had nationalism and tradition drilled into your head for years on end it can be hard to step back and realize that maybe we’ve been wrong– that’s how indoctrination works and why it’s so hard to break free from it. We grow up being taught that America is the greatest nation that has ever existed, that we are exceptional compared to others, that we are a “Christian” nation, and that whatever we do is good, right, and justified. And so, pledging to give our allegiance to such an entity is an easy sell, as the narrative we are given doesn’t seem on the surface to conflict with some basic understandings of following Jesus.

However, the release of the now infamous CIA Torture Report should be the final blow that closes the case on Christians reciting the pledge of allegiance.

From reading the report, it should now be crystal clear to anyone who has read the teachings of Jesus as found in scripture that one cannot swear their allegiance to America while simultaneously giving our allegiance to the alternate way of Jesus. Absolutely, positively, impossible.

The contents of the report reveal what the US has done, and what has been done is anti-Christ– pure, absolute evil.

Kyle Cupp nods, claiming that “some evils are so intolerable, so embedded in an institution, that you cannot in good conscience pledge allegiance to that institution”:

The United States of America receives no special graces or blessings that keep it mostly on the side of Christ. It’s not and never has been a “Christian nation.” It is not the world’s savior. American Christians do not owe their nation permanent loyalty. For Corey, the US absolutely crossed the line, although he already had serious concerns about the pledge.

I sympathize. The US flag doesn’t symbolize liberty and justice for all–or a nation-state that should always remain indivisible and in existence. What allegiance I have to my country is conditional. Unless we see fundamental and structural reforms, I do not wish for the US to persist until the end of history. I believe the people of my country have done great good and have the capacity for great good in the future, but the reformers aren’t running the show, and I’m not overflowing with hope.

(Photo by Alan Levine)

God, Aliens, And Us, Ctd

But first, E.O. Wilson explains why he believes extraterrestrial life is out there:

Many readers counter Linker’s doubts that monotheistic faiths could cope with the discovery of E.T.:

There is no problem here. It’s called the scandal of particularity. God revealed himself to the Jews and not to other nations. Nevertheless, it became incumbent upon the chosen people to spread the good news to the other nations. “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” Isaiah 49:6

The nations were the aliens of their day.

Samaritans, then the Greeks, then the Romans, …. the Irish and the Native Americans we all aliens to the promise, yet God preaches peace to those who are far off and to those who are near. Eph 2:17  The Irish took to the Gospel like ducks to water. So much so that there were no Irish martyrs. Why would we assume that ET wouldn’t be receptive to the good news as well?

Damon Linker says, “the discovery of advanced life on other planets would imply that human beings are just one of any number of intelligent creatures in the universe.” And that is a problem how? Indeed, the would need to be intelligent in order to receive the gospel. He seems to think that God speaks to us because were better than others.

Not so. The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but because the LORD loved you and kept the oath which He swore to your forefathers” Deuteronomy 7:7-8

Finally, does Linker think created in God image means body shape? Surely, he can’t be that naïve!

Another notes “one obvious flaw” with Linker’s position:

The monotheistic religions I know of all believe in “Angels”, who are not human, nor are of earth (also Devils/Demons, fallen versions of the same). To adapt to finding a THIRD group of intelligent beings, is different than if they believed we were unique in our intelligence and will.

Another reader:

Has Damon Linker communicated with all of the space aliens out there? If not, how can he write the line that you quote: “Did God create those other intelligent creatures, too, but without an interest in revealing himself to them? Or did they, unlike human beings, evolve all on their own without divine origins and guidance?”

If he doesn’t chat with them, how does he know that they have no divine origins and guidance, that they do not have religion? How does he know that God has not revealed himself to them? If they are out there, maybe some space people live in far greater harmony with God than we do on earth.

Another notes:

Seventh-Day Adventists, the denomination of my youth that I no longer claim, believe quite readily in aliens.  The story is that other worlds do in fact exist, that god created a universe of many inhabited planets with unique beings, that each had a Tree of Life and a temptation and that we are the only planet that fell.  So life on this planet is part of a “Great Controversy” between God and Satan to determine who’s right about everything, and the other planets are simply waiting and watching for the outcome.  Adventism came out of the mid 1800s, I’m sure there are some cultural contributions to the SF narrative in their eschatology.  But I’ve never seen anyone really pick it apart.

One more reader:

For a decade or so, all the subjects surrounding these questions have been discussed in conferences held by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley and in its journal, Theology and Science. So Christian, Jewish and Moslem theologians are involved and will not be caught unaware. Both CTNS and the Vatican (with an observatory in Arizona) are active participants in SETI – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

“The Tradition Of The Argumentative Jew”

Leon Wieseltier praises it:

Learning to live with disagreement … is a way of learning to live with each other. Etymologically, the term machloket refers to separation and division, but the culture of machloket is not in itself separatist and divisive. This is in part because all the parties to any particular disagreement share certain metaphysical and historical assumptions about the foundations of their identity. But beyond those general axioms, the really remarkable feature of the Jewish tradition of machloket is that it is itself a basis for community.

The community of contention, the contentious community, is not as paradoxical as it may seem.

The parties to a disagreement are members of the disagreement; they belong to the group that wrestles together with the same perplexity, and they wrestle together for the sake of the larger community to which they all belong, the community that needs to know how Jews should behave and live. A quarrel is evidence of coexistence. The rabbinical tradition is full of rival authorities and rival schools—it owes a lot of its excitement to those grand and even bitter altercations—but the rivalries play themselves out within the unified framework of the shared search. There is dissent without dissension, and yet things change. Intellectual discord, if it is practiced with methodological integrity, is compatible with social peace.

The absence of the God’s-eye view of an issue, and the consequent recognition of the limitations of all individual perspectives, has a humbling effect. A universe of controversy is a universe of tolerance. Machloket is not schism, and the difference is crucial. Though disagreement may lead to sectarianism, most disagreement in the history of this ever-thinking people has been contained, and has been brilliantly developed, on this side of sectarianism. I do not mean to exaggerate the loveliness of the system: There has been heresy and there has been heterodoxy, and Jews have persecuted other Jews for their opinions. Intellectual integrity is always a risk to community, because some minds may think themselves, rightly or wrongly, beyond the limits. But the tradition of Jewish debate, especially legal debate, is striking for how rich it remains within the limits. Whether or not heresy and heterodoxy are forms of heroism, it is important to acknowledge that fidelity, and the internal growth of a tradition inside its carefully examined boundaries, may also be heroic.

“The Best Of All Possible Worlds”

The phrase comes from the early modern philosopher, G.W. Leibniz, used in his book Theodicy – though it was made famous when Voltaire later mocked it in Candide. Marc E. Bobro unpacks what it means:

In the book, Leibniz defines “world” as “the whole succession and the whole agglomeration of all existent things, lest it be said that several worlds could have existed in different times and different places. For they must needs be reckoned all together as one world or, if you will, as one Universe.” In this world, everything is dependent on something else for its existence — so that in order for the whole world to exist, a first cause must have brought it into being. But an infinite number of worlds were “equally possible,” so that in creating this world, the first cause must have been able to consider all other possible worlds. This first cause, being “infinite in all ways” — including in power, wisdom, and goodness — must have chosen the best of all possible worlds.

It is a point of interpretive controversy how close to perfection Leibniz believed the best world comes.

While most think that Leibniz considered it to be good in absolute terms, both metaphysically and morally, at least one commentator, Matthew Stewart in The Courtier and the Heretic (2006), considers Leibniz to be “in fact one of history’s great pessimists,” who recognized the vanity of striving for progress in this world that is ultimately indifferent to our desires. … But this cynical view of Leibniz’s optimism requires not only an excessively imaginative and tortuous reading of some of his most important works; it would also seem to be undermined by the dedication Leibniz brought to several other efforts, including especially his project to advance all the sciences. A proper understanding of this project reveals that Leibniz’s philosophical and theological optimism in fact shaped his vision of advancing the sciences, and that his political and ecumenical work was often aimed at furthering that end.

Leibniz made clear that he did not mean that the best world is composed only of the best parts, just as “the part of a beautiful thing is not always beautiful.” While some aspects of the world may not seem good in themselves, they are part of a whole that is better than all the alternatives. No part could in fact have been other than it is, neither better nor worse, since then the world would no longer be as it is, and this world is the best, having been chosen by an infinitely wise God.