Headline News
"My" newspaper's Page One headlines about the GOP convention this week
have been:
* Monday: "Thousands of anti-Bush protesters fill NYC"
* Tuesday: "GOP opens with attacks on Kerry"
* Wednesday: "First Lady Hail's Bush's Leadership"
* And tomorrow: "Cheney, Miller Assail Kerry"
Hmmm. Let's have a look back in the newsroom library (the one with the
framed Michael Moore quote by the door) at the Page One headlines from
the same days during the Democratic convention in July:
* Monday: "Kerry asks: 'four more years of what?' "
* Tuesday: "Clinton: 'I'm 'foot soldier' for Kerry"
* Wednesday: "Kerry: Implement 9/11 plan," with sub-head "Democratic
hopeful challenges Bush over leadership on terror battle." And a
second Kerry story on the same page: "Heinz Kerry touts husband's
record"
* Thursday: "Edwards calls for 'politics of hope,' " and a second
Kerry story, above the fold: "Kerry arrives to hero's welcome,"
with a sub-head, "Vietnam vets surround Democratic nominee."
Now, there's no doubt here whom my editors want to see win this thing.
Cheney is "pure evil" and the election is "the most important of our
time" because they don't think the world will survive four more years
of Bush.
Extra-Solar Planets
Keep track of them as the discoveries pile up on this excellent site.
Newspapers get scary when they try to do science (in the latest round
of discoveries, the Philadelphia Inquirer identified "mu Arae" as the
name of the planet, not the star).
The reporting tends to get breathy as the size of the planets being
found get closer and closer to the size of the Earth. But the other
side of that is, they're being found in places where planets that big
shouldn't be, according to what we think we know about how solar
systems form. Massive gas giants circling their suns in orbits tighter
than Mercury's? There are three possibilities:
1. Our method of measuring the orbits or sizes of these newfound
planets is wrong. (Seems unlikely.)
2. Our understanding of how solar systems are formed is way off.
Probably, and that's not entirely surprising. But the range of
astrophysics involved here is pretty limited. You can't introduce
Mickey Mouse in a wizard's cap to conjure up worlds where they don't
belong.
3. The gas giants formed in the "right" places (where our models
predict them), and then spiralled in to their current close orbits.
This might be the most likely explanation, and it's also the most
depressing, because it means any Earth-like planets that once orbited
in between have been blown out or chased into the star itself.
Depressing development if you're looking for life in space or future
homes for homo sapiens.
"Free Speech For Me ..."
"... but not for thee, FASCIST! FASCIST! FASCIST!"
Truth for the Goose, Slander for the Gander
Oh, That Liberal Media has the Wilmington News Journal tangled in its
own crossfire:
From the News Journal op-ed page, 8/23/04:
There is nothing honorable about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
The group is impugning the integrity of Sen. John Kerry, the
Democratic presidential candidate, with well-funded advertising
that twists truth with slander and innuendo.
From the News Journal op-ed page, 2/12/04:
Whether it is a tempest in a teapot or a brewing political scandal,
President Bush must answer questions about his National Guard
service. And the president ought to silence White House spokesman
Scott McClellan, who characterized these legitimate questions as
"gutter politics" or "trolling for trash."
Russian School Hostages
Best blog coverage of the terrorism is here.
Dysfunctional World
Anyone who follows the developments in the Arab Islamic world will
be struck by the complete absence of self-knowledge and
introspection that characterizes these vexed cultures. Almost every
problem is attributed to hostile external forces. The poverty and
underdevelopment that plague most of the Arab world are the result
of malicious machinations of Americans and Jews. This is no less
true of the disaster in Darfur. Last week UPI reported that the
Sudanese foreign minister Mustafa Osman Ismail had told journalists
in Cairo that his government possessed "information that confirms
media reports of Israeli support (for the rebels in Darfur)." He
added that he was "sure the next few days will reveal a lot of
Israeli contacts with the rebels."
Arab-Islamic World Is a Hostage of Its Own Delusions, by Leon de
Winter, in Outlook Today.
For too many pan-Arabist politicians, the possibility of foreign
intervention in Sudan is a greater problem than the currently
overwhelming humanitarian disaster in that nation -- never mind the
issue of whether Arab militias are actually fomenting genocide.
Indeed, as Julie Flint wrote on this page, an audience recently
offered Khartoum's ambassador in Beirut loud applause when he
stated that allegations against Sudan were part of a worldwide
conspiracy against all Arabs. Indeed, for too many Islamists
throughout the world, martyrdom has become its own nihilist reward.
Severed Heads and the Arab World's Foul Predicament, by Charles Paul
Freund, in The Daily Star.
It's been said that what the Muslim world needs is a Martin Luther. I
say it would do better with a John Locke. An intellectual but
religious man deeply disturbed by the social chaos of war and
revolution in his homeland and religious extremism run amok all around
him, he wrote "Essay Concerning Human Understanding."
He does not set reason about revelation; he is an anti-fanatic without
being an atheist altar-smasher. He addressed fundamental matters of
religion and morality with an eye toward living in a world where
social harmony was broken, and tradition had failed. He enlisted
reason as a primary agent of thinking, and freed the mind from the
medieval notion that rationality consists of studying tradition.
The essential stuff is in Chapter XVIII. Traditional revelation may
make us know propositions knowable also by reason, but not with the
same certainty that reason doth ... Even original revelation cannot be
admitted against the clear evidence of reason ... Revelation in
matters where reason cannot judge, or but probably, ought to be
hearkened to ... In matters where reason can afford certain knowledge,
that is to be hearkened to ... If the boundaries be not set between
faith and reason, no enthusiasm or extravagancy in religion can be
contradicted ....
One reason change comes to Islam with glacial slowness is not simply
that it's legal code and worldview is based on an ancient revelation,
but that that revelation has been interpreted via an evolved
methodology. The methodology, more than the revelation, is what keeps
reform from breaking through.
Without it, one could easily pit the Qur'an against the Qur'an, taking
each troublesome verse in some different light to make it conform to a
modern standard. Reformers have tried to do that.
For instance, the Tunisian Law of Personal Status (1956) addressed
polygamy in a Qur'anic context. The traditional law permitted a man to
marry up to four wives. Tunisian reformers found this offensive to
modern mores, and attempted to abolish it based on the very Qur'anic
verse that permitted it, 4:3: "Marry of the women, who seem good to
you, two or three or four; and if ye fear that ye cannot do justice
then one only ... It is more likely that ye will not do justice."
No one besides the Prophet was sufficiently perfect to treat two or
more wives with complete equality and justice, they reasoned; hence,
realistically, the latter part of the verse supplants the former part.
But this was roundly rejected by Muslim legal scholars because it was
not sustained by any cohesive legal methodology. It was an argument of
convenience, for the sake of one verse, one law. An injection of Locke
-- a native, Muslim Locke -- would be a first step toward prying open
the gates of unalterable law in the Middle East while respecting the
tradition of it. Locke has methodology.
The word "self-evident" appears in English for the first time in
Locke's essay. Less than a century later, Thomas Jefferson enshrined
the word in the Declaration of Independence. Human freedom begins with
a firm first step out of religious fanaticism.
Come Clean First, Then Move On
Johnann Hari is a young editorial writer with deep roots in the left.
And he's capable of casting a cold eye on them, and judging even his
idols by a higher standard. If the left is ever again to be more than
a loose collection of personality cults and "anti-" mentalities, it
will need more Johann Haris.
Almost everything one of my heroes, George Bernard Shaw, wrote
about domestic issues -- from homelessness to the arms trade --
seemed to me inspirational. Yet almost everything he wrote about
Stalin's Soviet Union takes the form of adulatory, gushing hymns to
Stalin. Ditto HG Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Bertolt Brecht
... the list of brilliant, inspirational left-wingers who --
apparently seamlessly -- became apologists for the most murderous
tyrannies of the 20th century is long. How?
His exploration of that question is enlightening. So is his conclusion
about the current state of the left, and what it ought to be learning,
but in too many cases isn't.
And in Michael Moore's blockbuster movie Farenheit 9/11, he depicts
Iraq in the era of Saddam Hussein. He describes it as a sovereign
country, where small children fly kites and old women laugh
merrily. That's it. That's his account of Iraq under Saddam. Most
of the left opposed the recent war for decent reasons. Most of us
did not deny Saddam's crimes. But can't we all recognise that the
impulse that led Moore to gloss over Saddam's programme of genocide
is the same impulse that led so much of the 20th-century left to
gloss over the crimes of communism?
Couldn't Moore have opposed the war while honestly acknowledging
the terrible downside of that choice? If we do not check ourselves
against this tendency, aren't we doomed to repeat the worst parts
of the left's history?
If we have learned anything from the 20th century, it must be that
the disgusting nature of our opponents does not give us a licence
to become as disgusting. We cannot allow ourselves to indulge "our
bastards"; we cannot set aside democratic norms in order to beat
people we judge to be even worse. As the globe warms and over a
billion people live on less than one dollar a day, a global left is
needed more than ever. But it must be a democratic left. It's time
-- at last -- to let Che Guevara and his comrades die.
Previous Posts
* A Short Good-Bye
* Rugrats Politics
* Boy Who Cried Wolfowitz
* Memo to Mike
* Not Evil, Just Misunderstood
* Our Front Page Tomorrow
* Chomskyite Co-Worker Quote of the Day
* Sayonara, Iraq?
* "Fahrenheit 1941"
* As a Matter of Fact ...
Archives
* February 2004
* March 2004
* April 2004
* May 2004
* June 2004
* July 2004
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