Counterstrike
Reflections on 'Blowback' - Lee Harris
It is simply a myth to believe that only interventionism yields unintended consequence, since doing nothing at all may produce the same unexpected results. If American foreign policy had followed a course of strict non-interventionism, the world would certainly be different from what it is today; but there is no obvious reason to think that it would have been better.
Iran: The wrong options on the table
- Spengler
The neo-conservatives "idealists" in the US had an easy, neat and plausible solution to the Middle East in the form of exporting democracy to the region. They were wrong. Similarly, the "realists", who, judging by the recent intelligence estimate on Iran, are in the ascendancy in the Bush administration, have a neat and easy solution - balance of power and deterrence. They are also wrong. There will not be a happy ending.
The abandonment of the Jews - Caroline Glick
The US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear intentions is the political version of a tactical nuclear strike on efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs.
In Praise of Carbon - John BrignellSuch delicious irony. How is that today's twisted eco-fascists have turned the source of all life into the destroyer of worlds?
Road to Bali - Peter FosterThe issue is not whether humanity will succumb to a "climate crisis," ... it's whether the authoritarian enemies of freedom (who rarely if ever recognize themselves as such) will succeed in using environmental hysteria to undermine capitalism and increase their Majesterium.
Television Networks Fade To Black As The U.S. Surge Succeeds In Iraq - Rich NoyesWinning the war? Who cares about that?
How to be a ?dudelike? mum
Zoe Williams? witty and insightful Bring It On, Baby joins a tiny handful of new books calling for solidarity between parents and a war of resistance against patronising parenting propaganda.
Why more and more people feel ?mentally ill?
Yes, the American Psychiatric Association?s DSM is mad, labelling even shyness a disorder. But it didn?t create today?s therapy culture.
Hans Blix?s Stalinist rewriting of history
Far from being anti-war heroes, UN weapons inspectors paved the way for the bombing of the ?bastards? and ?moral lepers? of Iraq.
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The trust thing - July 28, 2010
Conrad Black is out of prison in Florida; the former CanWest papers are acquiring new owners; the JournoList scandal continues in the U.S.; and we sweat through insupportably humid heat, thanks to jetstreams a long way north of where they should b...
Good news - July 25, 2010
Let me record in passing how happy I am that the Harper government is getting rid of the "long form" of the census. Or rather, I wish it were doing so entirely: instead it is replacing one of innumerable arbitrary invasions of the citizen's privac...
JournoLism - July 24, 2010
The word "detachment" has several meanings. It may refer, for instance, to the state of being free of prejudice or bias, to being "disinterested" -- a word that in turn means almost the opposite of "uninterested." But it can also refer to a milita...
The United States and Europe stood up to Serbia. Can they stand up to North K...
The impressive decision last week by the International Court of Justice in The Hague?to reject the claim submitted by Serbia that Kosovo's 2008 declaration of independence was unlawful?was mostly either ignored or reported in articles festooned with false alarmism about hypothetical future secessions. Allow this precedent, moaned many, and what is to stop, say, Catalonia from breaking away?
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Mel Gibson's tirades are the distilled violence, cruelty, and bigotry of righ...
Every time Mel Gibson unburdens himself of a tirade against Jews or "n______s" or uncooperative females, there are commentators on hand to create a mystery where none exists. When he produced The Passion of the Christ, which lovingly and in detail recycled the bloody myth that all Jews are historically and collectively responsible for the murder of Jesus, it was argued by many mainstream Christians that his zeal for the faith might be a touch lurid but that the film itself was mainly devotional. When he was arrested on the Malibu freeway and screamed abuse at a police officer to the effect that Jews were responsible for all the wars in the world, pundits convened on page and screen to speculate whether our Mel had too much to drink that evening. Not long ago, I watched him go completely bug-eyed on television at a Jewish interviewer who asked him about the latter incident. "You've got a dog in this fight, haven't you?" he hissed. And now, in the wake of a Niagara of cloacal abuse directed at the mother of his youngest child, in which we were spared nothing by way of obscenity and menace and nothing by way of paranoid and sexualized racism, there have been those who diagnose Gibson's problem as a lack of anger management skills, combined perhaps with a touch of narcissistic personality disorder.
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Why is the U.S. Treasury Department subsidizing zealots who oppose our foreig...
Has President Barack Obama ever looked more ineffectual than he did last week, sitting almost wordlessly next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while the latter, on what seems like his 10th trip to Washington this year, lectured us all yet again on the importance of leaving Israel unmolested and even uncriticized? Even as the press conference dragged on, with the words "peace process" coming to sound more hollow and mocking by the moment, bulldozers and settlers were continuing their apparently uninterruptable creation of facts on the ground, all designed to forestall or pre-empt the availability of a geographic space in which even a vestigial Palestinian state could be created. Barely reported was the blatantly expressed view of Netanyahu's thuggish foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman?a man so hostile to diplomacy that he barely travels?that no such state could be expected from the current negotiations in any case. Apparently forgotten is the humiliation of Vice President Joe Biden, whose visit to Jerusalem last March was made laughable when the Israeli housing ministry?currently under the control of the religious Orthodox Shas Party?insisted on pressing ahead with new construction in a hotly disputed neighborhood.
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Bad reasons to be good
By Sam Harris | October 22, 2006
THE MIDTERM elections are fast approaching, and their outcome could well be determined by the ``moral values" of conservative Christians. While this possibility is regularly bemoaned by liberals, the link between religion and morality in our public life is almost never questioned. One of the most common justifications one hears for religious faith, from all points on the political spectrum, is that it provides a necessary framework for moral behavior. Most Americans appear to believe that without faith in God, we would have no durable reasons to treat one another well. The political version of this morality claim is that our country was founded on ``Judeo-Christian principles," the implication being that without these principles we would have no way to write just laws.
It is, of course, taboo to criticize a person's religious beliefs. The problem, however, is that much of what people believe in the name of religion is intrinsically divisive, unreasonable, and incompatible with genuine morality. The truth is that the only rational basis for morality is a concern for the happiness and suffering of other conscious beings. This emphasis on the happiness and suffering of others explains why we don't have moral obligations toward rocks. It also explains why (generally speaking) people deserve greater moral concern than animals, and why certain animals concern us more than others. If we show more sensitivity to the experience of chimpanzees than to the experience of crickets, we do so because there is a relationship between the size and complexity of a creature's brain and its experience of the world.
Unfortunately, religion tends to separate questions of morality from the living reality of human and animal suffering. Consequently, religious people often devote immense energy to so-called ``moral" questions -- such as gay marriage -- where no real suffering is at issue, and they will inflict terrible suffering in the service of their religious beliefs.
Consider the suffering of the millions of unfortunate people who happen to live in sub-Saharan Africa. The wars in this part of the world are interminable. AIDS is epidemic there, killing around 3 million people each year. It is almost impossible to exaggerate how bad your luck is if you are born today in a country like Sudan. The question is, how does religion affect this problem?
Many pious Christians go to countries like Sudan to help alleviate human suffering, and such behavior is regularly put forward as a defense of Christianity. But in this case, religion gives people bad reasons for acting morally, where good reasons are actually available. We don't have to believe that a deity wrote one of our books, or that Jesus was born of a virgin, to be moved to help people in need. In those same desperate places, one finds secular volunteers working with organizations like Doctors Without Borders and helping people for secular reasons. Helping people purely out of concern for their happiness and suffering seems rather more noble than helping them because you think the Creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it, or will punish you for not doing it.
But the worst problem with religious morality is that it often causes good people to act immorally, even while they attempt to alleviate the suffering of others. In Africa, for instance, certain Christians preach against condom use in villages where AIDS is epidemic, and where the only information about condoms comes from the ministry. They also preach the necessity of believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ in places where religious conflict between Christians and Muslims has led to the deaths of millions. Secular volunteers don't spread ignorance and death in this way. A person need not be evil to preach against condom use in a village decimated by AIDS; he or she need only believe a specific faith-based moral dogma. In such cases we can see that religion can cause good people to do fewer good deeds than they might otherwise.
We have to realize that we decide what is good in our religious doctrines. We read the Golden Rule, for instance, and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses. And then we come across another of God's teachings on morality: If a man discovers that his bride is not a virgin on their wedding night, he must stone her to death on her father's doorstep (Deuteronomy 22: 13-21). If we are civilized, we will reject this as utter lunacy. Doing so requires that we exercise our own moral intuitions, keeping the real issue of human happiness in view. The belief that the Bible is the word of God is of no help to us whatsoever.
As we consider how to run our own society and how to help people in need, the choice before us is simple: Either we can have a 21st-century conversation about morality and human happiness -- availing ourselves of all the scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last 2,000 years of human discourse -- or we can confine ourselves to an Iron Age conversation as it is preserved in our holy books.
Wherever the issue of ``moral values" surfaces in our national conversation in the coming weeks, ask yourself which approach to morality is operating. Are we talking about how to best alleviate human suffering? Or are we talking about the whims of an invisible God?
The Boston Globe, October 22, 2006
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