The dictator at the tea-party: if you invite, must you be polite?

The New Neo Posted on by

The Columbia/Bollinger/Ahmadinejad controversy has had several stages. First there was the shock that the university had extended the invitation. Then there was the event itself. And now there’s the reaction.

The notion of freedom of speech has come to include the idea that in order to protect it we must bend over backwards to provide a forum for enemies to promulgate their ideas. But I really can’t imagine that freedom of speech would have meant that, in the 30s, a major university would—or should—have given Hitler a similar invitation.

Of course, there’s always the argument that greater exposure to such pernicious leaders makes more people aware of their dangerousness, and thus enables us to evaluate and prepare to counter them. But that doesn’t really convince me; it’s not as though heads of state such as Ahmadinejad (or Hitler, in his day) lack the ability to speak, and for their words to be covered and spread around the wolrd by the press. There are few people with more opportunity to spread their word; we’re not talking about silenced voices here. Continue reading →

More Totten, more “getting to know you” in Iraq

The New Neo Posted on by

Michael Totten has written another fine piece on recent developments in Iraq.

He interviews Colonel Mike Silverman, whose words echo a fact that other interviewees have emphasized in a recent article of Totten’s (one I discussed in depth here): al Qaeda appears to have overplayed its sadistic hand in Sunni areas of Iraq that might otherwise have been its natural allies, and greater exposure to the US military has convinced the locals that we just might be the good guys after all.

I wonder sometimes, when I’m feeling optimistic, whether it isn’t some intrinsic characteristic of evil to always overplay its hand. This may be one of the built-in advantages to the human race of evil being so very evil.

But this doesn’t inevitably lead to its downfall. The article also makes it clear that, without the help of the US, the locals were virtually powerless to fight off the sadistic violence of what was in fact a relatively small number of frenzied and extraordinarily vicious thugs.

All I want for Christmas is some tater mitts

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I was watching TV and was transfixed by an ad for Tater Mitts.

Yes, I admit it was very late at night, so perhaps my judgment was just a trifle clouded. But here, folks, is another bizarre product you never knew you needed but now simply cannot do without (see also this).

Tater Mitts haven’t yet inspired me to poetry, as this invention did. But I think they will revolutionize the onerous task of potato peeling.

Then again, maybe not.

Happy Birthday, Sputnik

The New Neo Posted on by

From the NY Times comes a reminder that it’s Sputnik’s birthday soon.

The article begins begins like this:

Fifty years ago, before most people living today were born…

Ouch.

I, of course, remember (if only vaguely) the news of Sputnik’s launch. It goes along with remembering those house calls, although those were the wave of the past and Sputnik the wave of the future).

The Times describes the reaction of the US as “wonder and foreboding,” and this jibes entirely with my own memories. For years after the launch, Sputnik was the stick they used in school to goad us to achievement.

And what a strange-looking stick it was, with mysterious protruberances sticking out from its basically round form:

sputnik.jpg

How was Sputnik’s launch interpreted? The US was falling behind in the all-important space race. We children were at fault for not learning enough science, even if we were toddlers.

We had to accelerate, and accelerate we did. As the article describes, the US countered with its own space program and satellites. Then, when the Russians sent the first man into space—Gagarin—we countered some more. Lift-offs were now seen on a television wheeled into an auditorium where the entire grade school had gathered to watch, and the sense of excitement was palpable.

These days the space program is ho-hum, the sense of urgency gone, the agency clouded by accidents and scandals. In retrospect, the whole thing seemed to have a fairly short trajectory, as did Sputnik itself.

[NOTE: Interesting arcane fact presented in Wikipedia (and who am I to doubt them, even though the article says “citation needed?”):

The launch of Sputnik 1 inspired writer Herb Caen to coin the term “beatnik” in an article about the Beat Generation in the San Francisco Chronicle on April 2, 1958.]

They make house calls—for a price

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was very young, safe in bed with the usual flu or the occasional chicken pox or other standard childhood disease, I would dread the doctor’s tread on the stairs and the opening of his little black bag, which seemed vast to me. It was made of thick black leather and smelled of medicine and disinfectant—just like his office did, the one with the transom window above the door, the tiny uncomfortable wooden chairs, and the table with a map of fairyland on it that looked ancient even then.

He was a small man, our pediatrician. But I was even smaller, and he was scary, without the jovial bedside manner common to the genre nowadays. He had a tiny, trim mustache, and when he gave shots—and he gave them quite readily—they hurt.

But he made house calls. Any time my brother or I were sick enough to stay home from school, we knew we could not avoid his visit.

By the time I was the mother of a young child the house call was a thing of the distant past. Continue reading →

And then there was one: the last Jew in Afghanistan

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Zebulon Simentov has the dubious honor of being the very last Jew in Afghanistan. He tends the near-empty synagogue in Kabul, and slaughters his own kosher meat, and otherwise is indistinguishable from his neighbors, who seem uniformly friendly to him.

This may be because many of them claim Jewish origins themselves. Apparently, the Afghan royal family believes it is descended from the tribe of Benjamin; and the Pashtun, Durrani, Yussafzai, and Afridi tribes count themselves as descendants of Saul and call themselves “Bani-Israel.”

I could quote the old joke “funny, you don’t look Jewish”—except for the fact that I’ve always noticed that many of them sort of do. Of course, that’s true of most peoples of the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

The disappeared Jewish community of Afghanistan was an ancient one, fed partly from migrations from Iran (Persia), site of a much larger Jewish presence for millennia. Paralleling the history of much of Sephardic Jewry, most of the Jews of Afghanistan migrated in the middle of the twentieth century, primarily to Israel.

I’ve written before about how countries such as Germany and Poland have had a revival of interest in—and even nostalgia (“Jewstalgia”) for—their not-so-long-lost Jewish populations, now that they have so few Jews left. That development seems quite far off in the Muslim world, but it is certainly possible—some day.

Mapes and Rather: Davids vs. blogosphere Goliaths—or, who’s got the biggest cojones?

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Mary Mapes is back.

Remember her? She had her fifteen minutes of fame—in her case, unwanted notoriety—as one of the 60 Minutes producers who worked on the program featuring the obviously forged Killian memos. In this extraordinary document, Mapes is defending herself and her old friend Dan Rather, “legendary reporter…[who] still has more reportorial testosterone than the entire employee roster at FOX News.”

Whew. This is the level of argument we’ve come down to in journalism today: who’s got the biggest cojones. Continue reading →

The France 2 trials: the wheels of French justice grind slow…

The New Neo Posted on by

..and they don’t grind all that fine, either.

But grind they do.

Regular readers of this blog may remember that about a year ago I had the exciting opportunity of traveling to Paris to cover one of the France2 defamation trials (my posts on the subject can be found by going to the right sidebar under “Categories” and clicking on “Paris and France2 trial” for the links).

These trials featured the interesting spectacle of a government-owned TV station, France2, suing ordinary citizens and bloggers who had accused the station and its renowned correspondent Charles Enderlin of lying in their coverage of the al Durah incident of 2000. It was the equivalent of Dan Rather suing Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs for accusing him of presenting forgeries in the Killian memo controversy (and speaking of Dan Rather suing, take a look at this). Continue reading →

The Democrats’ antiwar strategy: wishing will make it so

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The antiwar faction of the Democratic Party seems troubled. How, when things looked so bright back in November of last year, could it have all gone so horribly wrong?

It’s not that they’re about to give up pressuring those swing Republicans—fearful for their jobs—to pressure Bush (not fearful for his) on Iraq. It’s just that they’re not seeing much light at the end of that particular tunnel any more.

Many of those in the antiwar movement have been quick to lose whatever faith they may have once had in our ability to wage the war in Iraq, and slow to have it revived even in the face of some recent good news on that score. That’s their prerogative, of course, and reasonable minds can differ. But their faith in their own ability to just wish for enough antiwar votes to override a certain Presidential veto has remained remarkably intact, despite that fact that such an expectation has always been unrealistic. The numbers have just never been there. Continue reading →

Why we fight: how change can happen in Iraq

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When I began my blog, I knew I wanted to specialize in trying to explain how change of mind—especially in the political sense—happens. I’ve written here how therapy involves change on three dimensions—mind, emotions, and action—and how intervention on any of these axes can have a ripple effect to engender change on any or both of the others. Political change is no different.

But change of this sort is not easy. This is true for individuals, and perhaps to an even greater extent for societies. The human psyche is resistant to change and struggles mightily to preserve the status quo. Therapists even have terms for this: resistance, homeostasis, denial.

But change can occur, and when it does it can even be of a fundamental nature. Therapists must believe this or abandon the field.

And the same is true, strangely enough, for our effort in Iraq. If you eliminate those war critics in this country who are motivated by a hate-America agenda, and simply look at those who have bona fide objections to the war in Iraq, you might summarize the difference between those who still support our effort there and those who think we must get out now as, “the former believe fundamental change for the better is possible and is actually happening, while the latter believe it cannot and is not.” Continue reading →