European Dishonor: “The Western world has grown accustomed to hearing about the brutalities of Islamic law. However, these primitive practices are no longer limited to the remote tribal areas of Pakistan, the backward kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or oppressive, mullah-dominated Iran. Today, thanks in large part to a massive flow of immigration from Muslim countries, sharia law and medieval customs are becoming increasingly common in the heart of Christian Europe.” —National Review [via walker]

The authors are head writer and attorney/terrorism analyst at the Investigative Project, “a Washington, D.C.-based counterterrorism think tank.” I have no way of assessing the veracity or gravity of this exposé and know nothing about the Investigative Project. But the article is full of gruesome detail (Walker sent me a highlight describing how amputations are done under sharia) and allows the anecdotal excesses it describes to stand for European Islam as a whole, without counterexamples. Its ethnocentric bias is apparent from the first paragraph’s use of ‘backward’ to refer to Saudi Arabia and ‘Christian’ to refer to Europe, and it is xenophobically anti-immigrant, anti-diversity and pro-assimilation. Those who think differently are tarred with the brush of “political correctness.” All of these are buzzwords; one can imagine, without knowing, the ideological orientation of the authors, or is it of the Investigative Project? The major intent of the article appears to be the indiscriminate demonisation of Islam as a whole.

Conservatism is Crazy, but Psychiatry is Here to Help: “For centuries, statesmen and philosophers have argued about just what modern political conservatism really is: aristocratic or meritocratic, orthodox or libertarian, reactionary or triumphalist. Finally, science has the answer: conservatism is madness. That, at least, is what four professors—Jack Glaser, Frank Sulloway, John Jost, and Arie Kruglanski—suggest in a study that got a great deal of attention in the last few months.” —The New Atlantis The paper attracted alot of attention in the lay press, headlined by campy histrionic comparisons of Bush with Hitler. Despite being more understated than that, the paper, whose authors are prominent enough in psychological academia to know better, had to be written more to be provocative than serious. It appers quite disingenuous of them to defend the paper on op-ed pages, as described in the article, with pained claims of innocence and surprise about pathologizing and, hence, offending anyone. While I believe that decreased cognitive complexity and flexibility, deep insecurity, and lagging moral development, make their bearers more suited to politically conservative thinking, and are characteristic of some conservatives (e.g. George W. Bush in spades), certainly the Right holds some appeal to some cognitively and emotionally sophisticated souls. Political psychology, which applies to populations or polities skills intended for and honed by analyzing individuals’ psyches, has always felt to me like a right shoe worn on a left foot. There is yet another false step, although I am not sure if it is that of Glaser et al or merely the New Atlantis rendition of their beliefs, in moving from inferring unconscious psychological roots of the political beliefs of subject such as Bush to labelling them as a variety of madness. In any case, call me crazy but I agree that “this stands as a powerful example of the misuse of science and the arrogance of expertise.”

Another example of Bush’s penchant for misleading us photographically:

“In the most widely published image from his Thanksgiving day trip to Baghdad, the beaming president is wearing an Army workout jacket and surrounded by soldiers as he cradles a huge platter laden with a golden-brown turkey.

The bird is so perfect it looks as if it came from a food magazine, with bunches of grapes and other trimmings completing a Norman Rockwell image that evokes bounty and security in one of the most dangerous parts of the world.

But as a small sign of the many ways the White House maximized the impact of the 21/2-hour stop at the Baghdad airport, administration officials said yesterday that Bush picked up a decoration, not a serving plate.” —Washington Post

The article also observes that Dubya’s pose was not visible to reporters covering the event. The photo was taken by a pool photographer and later distributed to news sources. This is the obvious way to do it if you are going to mislead.

The Builders Association/motiroti’s

Alladeen, Bangalore–London–New York:

“…(T)he Alladeen project explores how we all function as “global souls” caught up in circuits of technology, how our voices and images travel from one culture to another, and the ways in which these cultures continually reinterpret each other’s signs and stories.

The Alladeen project encompasses three collaborative works: this web project, http://www.alladeen.com (directed by Ali Zaidi); a cross-media stage performance (directed by Marianne Weems); and a music video (directed by Ali Zaidi), featuring music by Shrikanth Sriram (Shri) and video by Peter Norrman. Although distinct, these three works have been created in tandem, drawing on a common pool of imagery and information, with material from each interwoven into the others.”

Coincident with the twentieth anniversary of The Day After comes the announcement of this big-budget film on apocalyptic global warming. However, it is certainly not the case that we need no longer worry about thermonuclear apocalypse either. If the Bush dysadministration has its way, we should all reacquaint ourselves with the 1983 film. As someone who was preoccupied back then with working on disarmament issues (whenever I wasn’t memorizing anatomical details for my medical school classes), the night I gathered wtih a group of like-minded friends to watch The Day After and consider that this event had the potential to break through the nuclear numbing (to use a phrase of my mentor, psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton) of millions of American viewers was a prodigious experience. It needs to happen for a new generation now too…

Rebecca Blood pointed us to this long thoughtful saga of the journey of an Idaho-bred conservative to a profound mistrust and disapproval of the current neo-conservative regime. An excerpt:

“There’s no doubt my feelings about the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s presidency affected my view of his behavior after the terrorist attacks. In fact, I was profoundly dismayed that someone as manifestly unfit for the office was occupying it at such a crucial moment in history. Now, had Bush gone about pursuing the war on terrorism seriously, building multinational coalitions; recognizing the myriad faces of terrorism, and the limits of the military response; perhaps even recognizing when a criminal-justice response is more warranted; and uniting the nation around a genuine consensus — well, then, I would have been forced to change my opinion of the man. I would have backed him as gladly as the Glenn Reynoldses and Andrew Sullivans are urging us to do now.

But Bush, of course, did not. Because he is so grotesquely shallow a leader, he has essentially allowed a cadre of genuine radicals — specifically, the ‘neoconservative’ ideologues from the Project for a New American Century — to take control of both our foreign policy and the entire direction of the ‘war on terrorism.’ The result has been that we have spit in the face of our traditional allies, as well as the United Nations (and then had the temerity to come back to them demanding help when it all turned sour); only limited recognition that terrorism has a home-grown face as well; embarked on an invasion of another country with the September 11 attacks as a pretext, while such claims have not proven to be well-grounded; and completely divided the nation by making out dissenters from the radical direction in which he has taken the nation as ‘unpatriotic.'”

But this is only a portal to the author’s ongoing and more broad-reaching work on incipient fascism in America.

This letter to the editor of Slate suggests that you have only yourself to blame if you grow frustrated reading the Kausfiles:

“I often make the mistake of trying to read Mickey Kaus the same way I’d read, say, Tim Noah or George Will – that is, as political commentary. When I attempt this, I leave Kaus’s columns feeling, dazed, confused, somewhat violated, yet strangely dreamlike… as if I’d been mugged and molested by the Pillsbury Doughboy. This is because Kaus isn’t writing poltical commentary. He’s writing a Page 2 gossip column. He just happens to be using Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton instead of Ben and J-Lo.

How else to explain the style of Kaus’s writing, which presents itself as opinionated yet lazily unintellectual, fawning yet derisive, biased yet blankly removed? To read Kaus is to read the world of politics not as a real world of actual ideas and events, but as a darling game, where points are scored, winners are glamorous, and all’s well as long as it’s all a lark in the end.”

Boy punished for talking about gay mom: “LAFAYETTE, Louisiana (AP) — A 7-year-old boy was scolded and forced to write ‘I will never use the word ‘gay’ in school again’ after he told a classmate about his lesbian mother, the American Civil Liberties Union alleged Monday.” —CNN

“According to new observations… from NASA’s IMAGE spacecraft and the joint NASA/European Space Agency Cluster satellites, immense cracks sometimes develop in Earth’s magnetosphere and remain open for hours. This allows the solar wind to gush through and power stormy space weather.” —NASA

Eric Wagoner says, “Jorn has been located. While I do not have word from him personally, it appears he is, quite literally, ‘getting away from it all’. Those near him, who had feared the worst, are glad he is safe and are respecting Jorn’s wishes to keep him out of sight.” [thanks to walker]