Peace in Our Time

"At last, we shall have peace in our time."
-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Britain, upon signing the Munich Agreement ceding Czechoslovakia to Hitler

South Park’s Cartoon Wars presents a humorous and satirical take on the issue of free speech. As is typical with the show, the writers take some current issue and extrapolate it to ludicrous proportions, thereby illuminating the flaws, contradictions, and stupidity which underpin it. The show lampoons the response of apologizing for the cartoons instead of defending them. It’s fine to draw cartoons criticizing other religions, but not Islam. Ironically, it’s fine to criticize the world’s largest superpower, but not Islamic nations. Rather, we ought to ignore the issues and hope that they go away.
The show also illustrates how Americans are easily spooked by the mere thought of offending Islam. In the town, mass panic ensues when a censored image is broadcast, and the school’s curriculum has a class added about how not to speak of Muslims.
And, sadly, some of what the episode exaggerates is true. Americans are easily spooked, and we do try to ignore our own constitution to keep angry people sated. And this from a nation which supposedly does not negotiate with terrorists. The last time a great nation tried to appease its foes by granting them what they wanted, there was a world war not a year later.

Sincere apologies for the tardiness of this post. It flew completely out of my mind yesterday.

Welcome to Airstrip One...

In her essay The Border Patrol State, Leslie Silko argues that the federal drive to stop illegal immigration has turned the southwestern United States into a police state. As evidence, she relates her own personal experiences and encounters with the Border Patrol, as well as the experience of others. She tells of a time when she was stopped and searched by Border Patrol cars, and when she was detained in the ironically named town of Truth or Consequences. She relates the experiences of two friends who were also stopped on a pretext and questioned or searched.
The essay does an excellent job of supporting her claims. Silko narrates the experiences with vivid and sometimes terrifying details. She starts the essay talking about how she was told that she was privileged to live in a country where people could travel anywhere without being stopped, and contrasts this throughout with stories of innocent people being inflicted with the same violation they were told that they were immune from. She ends the essay with the same ironic tone she started with, writing about the uselessness of border protection constructs and agencies. Finally she concludes by predicting that despite the billions of dollars expended, the borders will never really close.

For further information, you might want to consult the following:
(inspired by last class)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVAOqZlJQn8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bo7M_vKpb4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNPA88RUzWk

Y'know, this is a pretty cool idea...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/opinion/20gerecht.html?ref=opinion

Now, whether or not this link works is up for grabs, so here is the text of the article, pasted from the web page. No changes were made.

FOR those who believe — as I do — that the clerics who rule Iran must never have an arsenal of nuclear weapons, the United States’ course of action ought to be clear: The Bush administration should advocate direct, unconditional talks between Washington and Tehran. Strategically, politically and morally, such meetings will help us think more clearly. Foreign-policy hawks ought to see such discussions as essential preparation for possible military strikes against clerical Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The consensus among Iran’s ruling elite is that a hard-line stance on the nuclear question has paid off: uranium enrichment, the most industrially demanding part of developing nuclear weapons, has rapidly advanced. And, unexpectedly and gratifyingly, the Bush administration’s National Intelligence Estimate of November, which found that “in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program,” damaged Western resolve to invoke economy-crippling sanctions, let alone the American threat to use force against Tehran.

And perhaps the best news for Iran: the unclassified “key judgments” of the intelligence estimate reveal that the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency did not — and in all probability, still do not — have human and technical sources inside the inner circles of the Iranian nuclear program. The mullahs, who are quite savvy about American intelligence, having made mincemeat of C.I.A. networks in the past, surely see this. The great American debate about what to do about Iran’s nuclear capacity — a debate that may divide Americans from Europeans more than Iraq — could well return with a vengeance before next year. It will quickly bedevil the next administration.

Negotiations are likely the only way we can confront this threat before it’s too late. The administration’s current approach isn’t working. For selfish and malevolent reasons, China and Russia will not back tough sanctions. Neither likely will the trade-obsessed Germans and the increasingly self-absorbed, America-leery British. Washington and Paris cannot play bad cop alone. We must find a way to restore the resolve of all those parties and hit Iran with a tsunami of sanctions if we are to diminish the victorious esprit in Tehran and the centrifuge production at Natanz.

Yet, what has been the response of most American hawks to this mess? Prayer. They are essentially waiting for the clerical regime to do something stupid so that they can galvanize an awareness among Americans that mullahs should not have the bomb. True, the Iranian clerics have often done the wrong thing at the right time, from aiding the bombers of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996 and our African embassies in 1998, to the kidnapping of British sailors and marines last year. It is possible that Tehran, which wants to cause us great harm in Iraq and Afghanistan, could again back a terrorist attack that kills enough Americans to make preventive military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities mandatory.

But the Iranians know this. They know they are in the final nuclear stretch: they will likely play it sufficiently cool to make it difficult for the United States to strike them pre-emptively.

Thus the best reason to offer to begin talks with Tehran is that the regime will almost certainly refuse any offer to normalize relations. In the late 1990s, President Bill Clinton almost begged Iran’s reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, to sit and chat. The mullahs, who knew that Mr. Clinton was playing down Tehran’s role in the Khobar Towers bombing, spurned the offer. Since then, Iran’s internal politics have become more hard-core. In January, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s clerical overlord, re-rejected the idea, quite popular among average Iranians, that the Islamic Republic should re-establish relations with “Satan Incarnate.”

If the mullahs don’t want to negotiate, fine: making the offer is something that must be checked off before the next president could unleash the Air Force and the Navy. To make the threat of force against clerical Iran again credible, there needs to be a consensus among far more Democrats and Republicans that a nuclear-armed Iran is intolerable. If the White House tried more energetically to find a diplomatic solution to the nuclear threat, if it demonstrated that it had reached out to Iranian “pragmatists” and “moderates,” and that again no one responded, then the military option would likely become convincing to more Americans.

Critics of any discussions might respond that the Iranians might say yes, but to only low-level talks in Switzerland, not in Washington and Tehran. In so doing, the mullahs could bind the United States to meaningless, stalling discussions while the regime perfected uranium enrichment, increased the range and accuracy of its ballistic missiles and advanced its nuclear warhead designs.

But so what? Minus the direct talks, this is more or less what is happening now. Would a President John McCain tolerate pointless discussions? Probably not. Would Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton? Perhaps. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton may well prefer to see the clerical regime go nuclear than strike it preventively. But if that is where they would go, their opponents can do little about it. The only thing that could conceivably change their minds would be direct talks on the big issues separating the two countries. The mullahs have a way of driving their foreign interlocutors nuts. Just ask the European negotiators who’ve had to deal with them. Meeting Iranian leaders is perhaps the best way to turn doves into hawks.

For far too long, the United States has failed to wage a war of ideas with the Iranian regime over the proposal that scares them the most: the reopening of the American Embassy. Washington has the biggest bully pulpit in the world, and we are faced with a clerical foe that constantly rails against the intrusion of American values into the bloodstream of Iranian society. There are profound social, cultural and political differences among Iran’s ruling elites, let alone between that class and ordinary Iranians. Some of these differences could conceivably have a major effect on the progress of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. And the way to make these differences increasingly acute is to apply American soft and hard power.

Ayatollah Khamenei needs to be put off balance, as he was in 1997 when Mr. Khatami unexpectedly tapped into a huge groundswell of popular discontent and became president. What we need now is a psychological repeat of 1997: a shock to the clerical system that again opens Iran to serious debate.

When dealing with the mullahs, it is always wise to follow the lead of one of Iran’s most audacious clerical dissidents, former Interior Minister Abdallah Nuri. In 1999, he mocked the regime for its organic fear of the United States. Is the revolution’s Islam so weak, he said, that it cannot sustain the restoration of relations with the United States?

It would be riveting in Tehran — and millions of Iranians would watch on satellite TV — if Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice challenged the regime in this way: Islam is a great faith; the United States has relations with all Muslim nations except the Islamic Republic; we have diplomatic relations with Hugo Chávez and American diplomats in Havana. Why does the Islamic Republic fear us so? Is the regime so fragile? President Khatami repeatedly said that he wanted a “dialogue of civilizations.” The United States should finally say, “O.K., let’s start.”

If the Bush administration were to use this sort of diplomatic jujitsu on the ruling clerics, it could convulse their world. No, this is absolutely no guarantee that Tehran will stop, or even suspend, uranium enrichment. But a new approach would certainly put the United States on offense and Iran on defense. We would, at least, have the unquestioned moral and political high ground. And from there, it would be a lot easier for the next administration, if it must, to stop militarily the mullahs’ quest for the bomb.

Feb 18 stuff

Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02
/14/AR2008021403847.html

Thomson makes an aesthetic argument (in a very ironic sense) that George Romero's Diary of the Dead is not innovative because, unlike Romero's previous films, it does not address issues critical to our times. "Beyond the midnight-show scariness of his movies, Romero used the subgenre as a way to be ahead of the zeitgeist, most memorably in "Night of the Living Dead," which opened the wounds of race and racism; and in "Dawn of the Dead," which attacked our gross consumerism by setting the carnage in a shopping mall. And so on. But with "Diary," Romero has joined the satirical rank and file, the filmmakers who simply reprise existing notions that reflect our times. The target this time is too obvious and easy: the downloading, amoral, perpetually media-obsessed youth of today."

In her article Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism, Christine Rosen asks: “Does this technology, with its constant demands to collect (friends and status), and perform (by marketing ourselves), in some ways undermine our ability to attain what it promises—a surer sense of who we are and where we belong?” I would argue, especially in light of the Nicomachean Ethics, that FaceBook and MySpace do undermine our “sense of who we are and where we belong.” What kind of friendships come through these services? Most of the friends on my FaceBook page are people I rarely, if ever see; others are inhabitants of my dorm whom I never talk to, but which FaceBook claims I have “friended.” Aristotle writes: “Those who are quick to show signs of friendship to one another are not really friends, though they wish to be; they are not true friends unless they are worthy of [each others’] affection and know this to be true. The wish to be friends can come about quickly, but friendship cannot.” The kinds of friendship that come about through social networks like FaceBook and MySpace don’t really fall under any of categories of Aristotle, since they seem more like acknowledgments of other people’s existence than anything else. At a great stretch, one might describe them as the kinds of friendships which Aristotle says are based on pleasure. They are most certainly not “the perfect form of friendship...between good men who are alike in excellence or virtue.”
It seems to me that the term “friend” in the case of social networking, has been misapplied, since most of the friends aren’t really friends. At most, they are people whose company is enjoyable, but they do not complement, support, and better each other the way true friendship does. I think that they are more like acquaintances. Certainly, a few of my good friends are my “friends” on FaceBook. Then again, there are the nine or so friend requests from people I’ve never met in my entire life, or from people I dislike. They are “called ‘friends,’ as children are ‘friends’ with one another.” Thus, I would say that social networking websites and services have devalued friendship in that they have misapplied. We keep using the word, but it doesn’t really mean what we think it means.

Here's the article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/10/AR2008021002143.html?wpisrc=newsletter&wpisrc=newsletter

And here's my analysis:

Stephen Barr’s article, What Workers Should Consider when Voting for Their Next Boss, is good example of a definitional argument. Barr sets out to define something, namely, what workers in federal employ should consider when voting for president. After briefly summarizing the positions of the candidates, Barr gives his definition: the president ought to have “an understanding and appreciation of public service and of the people who work in the federal government.”
To support his argument Barr quotes several authorities in the area: the president of the National Treasury Employees Union, the president of the National Federation of Federal Employees, and the president of the Federal Managers Association, among others. All of these are in favor of the expansion of the public service, and say that employees should look for that in the candidate.
Barr uses good evidence to support his definition; he backs it up with quotes from knowledgeable experts in the field. He also makes it clear that federal employs probably will not vote Republican, since both Huckabee and McCain are in favor of drastic cutbacks and layoffs in both the public service and in government in general. One of Huckabee’s oft-quoted planks is his plan to eliminate the IRS, and McCain is in favor of reducing already anorexic budgets and firing many employees.
Barr bases his definition on the sound theory that employees like being employed. He backs his definition up with a slew of evidence from the presidents of federal unions. By comparing the various candidates, he makes it clear (although he never openly says) which candidate employees are likely to vote for. His definition is a sound and reasonalbe one.

First Glorious Post of the Second Glorious Blog

Let us hope that this blog survives, otherwise I shall be greatly wroth...

Link to art: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Lucas_Cranach_-_Antichrist.png

This is a woodcut made by Lucas Cranach the Elder. The title is "Antichrist."

This work makes strong pathetic appeals to the audience. It shows the pope residing in the Vatican, surrounded by lawyers and bankers. Any view of Cranach's time would immediately recall the biblical scene where Jesus drives the bankers out of the temple, and associate the pope with the bankers. Because the pope controls the church, yet will be driven out, the viewer would then confirm the title of the work and think of the pope as an anti-Christ. Cranach sets up the scene by employing logos. When the work was drawn in 1521, simony (the practice of selling Catholic offices and favors) was rampant, as the Church desperately need money to complete the Lateran Basilica in Rome. The viewer of this work would likely be wondering where all of the money went, and Cranach supplies a semi-logical conclusion. Cranach exploits ethos through his medium. Woodcuts were the means by which artists illustrated handbills, posters, and widely read books. No artist would dream of using woodcut for a portrait of a patron. By using woodcut rather than paint, Cranach establishes that he is not one of the people surrounding the pope, but an upright, moral, and humble man.