What are we trying to accomplish?

Greg Djerejian of Belgravia Dispatch has been guest blogging while Andrew Sullivan has been getting married, and he ends his stint with a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece on the desire for a change in American foreign policy. At the core, of course is a simple question: what are we trying to accomplish?

If we think of the GWOT… as mostly geared towards de-radicalizing Muslims to better ensure [that they] pursue a moderate, non-violent politics, how exactly does occupying Islamic nations or regions help in this goal? We’ve seen the hate engendered among Chechens of the Russians, or Pakistanis at India over the Kashmir dispute. We’ve seen how Israel has been bogged down in multiple wars since its founding in 1948. We see how Hezbollah significantly gained in popularity in Lebanon because of fall-out from Israel’s disastrous 1982 invasion. We are all familiar with the French experience in Algeria. Is it not the images of ‘collateral damage’ in Gaza, or a razed Grozny, or increasingly now Shi’a civilians being killed by U.S. air-strikes in places like Sadr City, is this not what poses a greater threat? These are the images that future Mohamed Atta’s might pass around the Internet cafes of the Parisian banlieu, or neglected corners of East London, helping precipitate further 9/11s.

Exactly. And yet there are still people who point with pride to the defeat of Saddam’s army and seem perplexed that the Iraqi’s didn’t welcome us with flowers and a firm commitment to laissez-faire economics. And those of us that could see the historical naivety of Bush et al still get lambasted as…

“wise heads” [whose counsel] has led to mass murders, the subjugation of millions, and, at best a suggestion that we could achieve some kind of “stability” that gives us some illusory peace, but at the cost of the Holocaust, the Ukrainian Famine, the “killing fields”, the Gulag and the mass graves and gassed Kurds. ((From an email I received today.))

To these “true believers”, those who oppose GWB and his bungled GWOT are Chamberlain-like appeasers, collaborators with Saddam ((Oh, wait: that was Rumsfeld.)), and Communist fellow-travellers. Or we’re “politicizing” things ((How do you “de-politicize” a war, for heaven’s sales?)) – we’re betraying the troops because we hate Bush (over Florida or something like that). How sad. And of course Bush’s incompetence means that we’ll never know whether there could have been a better way to deal with the situation.
What are we trying to accomplish? For Bush, the first duty was to protect the United States. For Blair, it was to protect Great Britain. For the two of them to respond to 9/11 by rushing into an irrelevant, stupid, unplanned, and incompetently executed war and occupation was bad enough. To do so in a way which has played into Bin Laden’s hands and turned this into a “Clash of Civilizations” and so made Great Britain (demonstrably) and the USA (probably) less safe is nothing short of treason.
So yes, I can understand why the American voters are looking for a fresh approach to foreign policy. Let’s start with competence….

The problem is not Dawkins, but Aquinas

In endorsing Cornwell’s strange article about Richard Dawkins, Chris wrote:

Increasingly, I’m coming to think that the big problem with the last few hundred years is that religions developed in a pre-modern world. None of the religions have really dealt adequately with modernism.

I disagree. I think that the “big problem” for Christianity ((Chris’s argument doesn’t really apply to other religions, so I won’t speak of them.)) was that “modernism” ((Is “modernism” a pejorative reference to the Enlightenment?)) caused a number of theological chickens to come home to roost.
Questions of ontology and epistemology didn’t originate with contemporary science; they were of great importance in Greek philosophy. It was (principally) Thomas Aquinas who made it his life’s work to harmonize Christian theology with the ideas of Aristotle and the empiricists. It was he who claimed to have established the idea that “God exists” as a rigorous ontological proposition. And this was not simply a passing fad of the 13th century: Aquinas’ teachings remain an essential part of much of Christian theology and linguistic usage.
What modernism did was to take Aquinas’ ontological propositions at face value, apply the 18th century notions of empiricism, and refute them. While it’s true that some Christians retrenched, and took the position that “existence” was never intended to be taken as a matter of empirical and verifiable fact, they represent a distinct minority. Both Christian fundamentalists and the Roman Catholic Church (for different reasons) remain wedded to the core of Aquinas’ thinking, and it’s not clear how they could ever give it up.

Another day, another scatalogical film

This afternoon I decided to see The Simpsons Movie. More fæces, more nudity, more filial speeches: it could have been a sequel to “Death at a Funeral”. But it wasn’t. It was just another very, very funny film. Matt and co. made excellent use of the big screen; it was a lot more than simply a collection of TV episodes. Recommended.

James Fallows on Bush's latest admissions

Here’s James Fallows of the Atlantic discussing Bush on disbanding the Iraqi military:

Think about this. The dissolution of the Iraq military is one of the six most-criticized and most-often-discussed aspects of the Administration’s entire approach to Iraq. (Others: the decision to invade at all; the assessment of WMD; the size of the initial invasion-and-occupation force; the decision not to stop the looting of Baghdad; and the operation of Abu Ghraib.) And the President who has staked the fortunes of his Administration, his party, his place in history, and (come to think of it ) his nation on the success of his Iraq policy cannot remember and even now cannot be bothered to find out how the decision was made.

The economy is the new religion

Jeremy Seabrook has an excellent piece in CiF on the way in which “the economy” has become the new religion. A comment by Ieuan is worth reproducing at length:

“The economy now has to be treated with a veneration long lost to mere religion.”

Thank you Jeremy. I thought I was the only one who was seeing the connection between the superstition of religion and the superstition of believing in the economy – a superstition which is admitted by ‘the market’ when they say the whole system only works due to ‘belief and confidence’.
Like ancient babylonian priests, who held a population in thrall by being able to foretell the times of eclipses and the equinoxes (not always accurately), the modern money masters hold us all in thrall by warning of the dire consequences which will befall us all if their words are not heeded. The ‘Dow’ and the ‘Footsie’ are quoted like prayers on the news bulletins, their movements interpreted as intently as any chickens entrails were in ancient Rome.
I hear no difference in tone, nor depth of belief, between Islamic fundamentalists and city boys, they both say that we must cleave to their ‘system’ or we are lost. Both look primitive and unthinking. And both seem, to me, to be far beyond the rational…a surrender of our (individual, human) power to the irrationality of a system – whether that be ‘economics’ or ‘religion’.

Yes indeed. I remember a dinner party back in 1981, soon after I arrived in the US, at which one of the guests was waxing lyrical about capitalism, property rights, and so forth. I suggested (quite mildly) that over the last few thousand years human beings had ordered their societies according to a number of quite different patterns, that none of them had lasted all that long, and that it was ahistorical to ascribe any uniquely special virtue to any particular pattern, just because it was the system under which we happened to be living. Five hundred years from now it will look as quaint as medieval guilds do today; ten thousand years from now it will be utterly forgotten. People reacted as though I had blasphemed, which in a sense I had.

How can "militant atheists" possibly compete with this?

In recent months, many people have called upon so-called “militant atheists” to show more respect for people’s beliefs. And I think I agree: we really don’t need to point our the absurdity of religion when believers do such a good job of self-satire. For example:

A Christian group wants Kenya’s High Court to declare Jesus Christ’s conviction declared ‘null and void’ and his Crucifixion ‘illegal.’

Note that not everybody agrees with this legal move: some think that the International Court in the Hague would be a more suitable venue. Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up…

"Death At a Funeral"

Just got home from watching Death At a Funeral downtown. ((The trailer is here.)) It was very funny in a very English way, which means that some of the audience (including yours truly) were laughing hysterically, while others seemed confused and occasionally grossed out. It was good to see my favourite actors from “Spooks”/”MI-5”, Mathew Macfadyen and Keeley Hawes, while Allan Tudik (whom most will remember as the pilot in “Serenity”) was inspired as the inadvertent victim of hallucinogenic “recreational pharmaceuticals”.
Geoff ArnoldGood fun. And then after lunch I celebrated by going up to Capitol Hill and getting (by my standards) a fairly radical haircut at Scream.

Why a gig?

The other day, I realized that I was surrounded by “gigs of flash”. Each one of these gadgets contains one gigabyte of Flash RAM:

  • Casio Exilim S600 camera
  • Kodak P850 camera
  • AT&T (HTC) 8525 cell phone
  • Sony PSP
  • Apple iPod Nano
  • Nokia 770 Internet Tablet
  • Nintendo Wii

Of course these seven “gigs” are packaged in five different form factors… And why a gig? For a camera or an MP3 player, 1GB means “big enough that the battery will die before you fill it up or listen to it all”. In many cases 1GB represented the “knee of the curve”, the best price-performance at the time.
The interesting question for me is when 120GB of flash is going to become price-competitive with a 120GB hard disk. Today you can get a 5400rpm 120GB disk for $80-100, quantity one. The first generation of plug-compatible flash replacements are still pretty expensive ($350 for 32GB), but the price per megabyte for flash seems to be dropping by around 65% per year, so we won’t have to wait long. In view of the benefits (reduced heat, better battery life, significantly better performance, robustness, etc.) I’d be happy to pay $300 for a 120GB replacement for my present laptop HDD.

Hats

I now understand why so many reviewers have said that Hats by The Blue Nile is such a perfect album to listen to through really good headphones, at night, with the lights out, with no distractions and no pressure of time. The only puzzle is how I managed to miss this since its release in 1989. (I only found it now because I was fooling around with liveplasma while checking out iWOW, and I decided to plug Prefab Sprout into both liveplasma and iTunes. Several clicks later, I landed on Blue Nile, and the rest is between me, the iTMS, and my credit card provider.)

iWOW!

The vast majority of my music collection is stored on my PowerBook, ((The CDs are archived back in Massachusetts)) and when I’m in my apartment I listen to it using iTunes. (I either use headphones or stream it via WiFi to my home theatre system.) The whole setup has been very satisfactory, but there was room for improvement. After a tip-off from Gene, I downloaded a plugin for iTunes called iWOW, from SRS Labs. I’d come across this company before; I have a pair of noise-cancelling headphones from Sharper Image which incorporate SRS technology.
I was blown away. The plugin allows you to manipulate the stereo separation, position, and definition in various ways; there are presets for various kinds of music and output devices. Try this: set iWOW up the way you want, then turn it off, start playing a familiar track, and turn iWOW on half way through. The effect is remarkable: a vast improvement over unmodified iTunes. There are also some cute tricks you can play: by turning down the “virtual centre speaker” you can eliminate most of the vocals, creating a kind of karaoke mode!
I used the free trial for a week, then shelled out $19.99 to register it. Well worth the money. Now if only I had an iWOW plugin for my iPod…