hmmmm.

An article in the New Republic on the relationship between British Pakistani radicals and Kashmir that mentions India just once. Hmmmm.

brilliant!

I don't know why I'm so shocked -- not to be blase or anything, but after all, in a profession that is about sex, these things are bound to happen -- but this profile of Joe Francis, the man who created Girls Gone Wild, in the Los Angeles Times, is a must-read. Not only there is enough reporting there to fill a at least a small book but the reporter, Claire Hoffmann, has crafted her story brilliantly -- I could barely stop reading. And, there has to be some truth there, although Hoffmann and Francis seem to have hated each other on sight. Still, read it, it's fascinating.

what's movielink thinking?

So I went along to Movielink as I often do, idly looking for movies that I could watch and clicked on their "All Genres" link. Among the genres listed were "Paramount", "Twentieth Century Fox" or "Warner Brothers". Hmmm. Since when? Only in the studio-centric world of a studio-run portal, I'd say.

But here's the best part. The same page, under a heading called "Award Winners" (yes, this is now a genre) includes Cannes, Oscar Winners, Oscar Nominees and then astonishingly further down the list: the Razzies! Huh? A movie rental advertising bad films? What was Movielink thinking? (For the uninitiated, the Razzies or the Golden Raspberries are awards that "complement the Academy Awards by dishonoring the worst acting, screenwriting, songwriting, directing, and films that the film industry has to offer" (via Wikipedia)).

Memo to Movielink: Surely it is too much to expect paying customers to rent Razzie-nominated movies? No? Or is there a hidden agenda here?

Come to think of it, do you think people would pay to watch bad movies? More specifically, would people pay to watch movies that are advertised as terrible films? Or do they watch it in the so-bad-that-its funny spirit? Is the so-bad-that-its-funny a new movie genre? One of the thousands of niches in the long tail of the movie-rental world? How many people really admired the knowing, sniggering virtuosity of The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra?

Finally, is Movielink just a lame and clueless movie portal or a postmodern pioneer in advertising?

a little rant on facial hair

Here's a diversion (for my non-existent readers) from the news-dominating Israel-Hezbollah fracas: a list of the Most Beautiful People from Capitol Hill, Washington D.C. (and no, its the first time I've encountered it too).

There are some unusual looking women there (for instance see #s 1 and 8, and skip all the beautiful blonde women in suits who look as if they stepped right off a conveyor belt) but really, what's with the men? I mean, yeah, they're all good-looking and pretty in that cute-looking-yuppie kind of way (What were you expecting? They work at Capitol Hill, for God's sake - ed) but they all have

a) short cropped (or Hugh-Grant-foppy) smooth hair
b) gelled, of course, all of it well in place, or deliberately mussed
c) infuriatingly clean-shaven faces(with some carefully calibrated stubbles)

Where are the guys with

a) beards
b) long hair, hell, different hair
c) interesting clothes

And why oh why do most of the men seem to work for Republicans? (Face it, Republicans are just better-looking than Democrats! - ed. No, they're not! It's just media bias!)

ps: another little trifle. A Vatican calendar with good-looking priests. Really!

pps: the Editor tic is shamelessly stolen from blogger Mickey Kaus.

Ross Douthat on the Religious Right

Here's a passage from Ross Douthat's review of some books on the rise of the Religious Right in America that I found thought-provoking:

As for why the Religious Right has become so tightly bound to the GOP, rather than becoming as Democratic as the Populists once were, or as bipartisan as the civil rights movement was (albeit ever so briefly)—well, that’s a question that the anti-theocrats rarely address in any detail, beyond dark references to the nefarious activities of Karl Rove. Only Phillips has the honesty to analyze the political trends that have brought about this supposedly theocratic moment—and he does so with almost charming obliviousness, quoting experts such as John Green, Geoffrey Layman, and Louis Bolce, as if unaware that their arguments vitiate his thesis.

What all these observers point out, and what the anti-theocrats ignore, is that the religious polarization of American politics runs in both directions. The Republican party has become more religious because the Democrats became self-consciously secular, and the turning point wasn’t the 1992 or the 2000 elections but the putsch of 1972, when secularist delegates—to quote Phillips, quoting Layman—suddenly “constituted the largest ‘religious’ bloc among Democratic delegates.” Yet having noted this rather significant fact, Phillips sets it aside and returns blithely to his preferred narrative, which is the transformation of the GOP into America’s first "religious party.” But that’s not what happened at all—or rather, it’s the second half of the story, the Republican reaction against the Democrats’ decision to become the first major party in American history to pander to a sizable bloc of aggressively secular voters.

This was very much a strategic electoral move on their part. As Mark Stricherz pointed out last year in a Commonweal essay titled “Goodbye Catholics,” Democrats in the McGovern era were faced with the crack-up of the old New Deal coalition and made a conscious decision to jettison blue-collar voters in favor of what a 1969 memo called “a different political and social group with rising educational levels, affluence, and . . . greater cultural sophistication.” At the time, pursuing a coalition of younger voters, minorities, and affluent suburbanites seemed a better bet than trying to hang on to socially conservative voters, especially given that all the energy in the party seemed to be coming from the Left. But it required the Democrats to identify with a segment of the population—self-identified secularists and nonbelievers—that has grown rapidly over the past three decades and grown more assertive along the way. Which in turn has alienated the devout plurality of Americans and left the democratic party stuck just shy of majority status for the better part of a generation.

So the rise of the Religious Right, and the growing “religion gap” that Phillips describes but fails to understand, aren’t new things in American history but a reaction to a new thing: to an old political party newly dependent on a bloc of voters who reject the role that religion has traditionally played in American political life. The hysteria over theocracy, in turn, represents an attempt to rewrite the history of the United States to suit these voters’ prejudices, by setting a year zero somewhere around 1970 and casting everything that’s happened since as a battle between progress and atavism, reason and fundamentalism, the Enlightenment and the medieval dark.

food for thought

Here's a quote to chew over, from Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts Jr., no less, on Neil Armstrong's first words from the moon.

''It is my recollection,'' Mr. Roberts wrote, ''that he actually said 'one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,' but the 'a' was somewhat garbled in transmission. Without the 'a,' the phrase makes no sense."

What do you think?

[Reported by Linda 'the Dramatic' Greenhouse in the New York Times.]

india and the free market

Does the free market work? Here's an interesting incident from Clive Crook's Atlantic essay on capitalism:

In the late 1980s, as Mikhail Gorbachev embarked on his perestroika program of economic reform, Soviet officials were sent abroad to see how things were done in the West. One visited London’s main vegetable market. He asked how the market was organized, and how prices were set. He was told that the individual traders bought whatever quantities they wished, and set their own prices, and that these fluctuated throughout the day as the balance of supply and demand changed. At this, the Soviet visitor laughed. He said he understood that this was the official line—but, please, how did the market really set prices?

It is one thing to believe that effective governance consists in being able to balance the demands of social justice (and I mean "social equality" as opposed to just "income equality") with the demands of the free market. But sometimes in mindlessly trumpeting the free market, it seems to me that the folks at TCS haven't done their fact-checking that well.

First there is this statement:

For 70 years, Mohandas Gandhi's myopic vision of backward-looking socialism as a template for national advancement was accepted as revealed wisdom by a string of Indian prime ministers, starting with his acolyte, Nehru.

And then this:

Despite a plenitude of cotton, Gandhi didn't think India should create a cotton industry, believing instead that every family should own a spinning wheel and spin its own. He didn't believe India should develop a manufacturing base, which not only caused the dead hand of "import substitution" to smother native initiative, but the failure to develop factories meant there was also a failure to develop infrastructure like roads and ports to take goods to market.

I should admit that, more or less, the last statement captures Gandhiji's vision correctly. And yet, while the vision of a small self-sufficient village, where everyone lived simply, might have made sense to "authentic" Gandhians like Acharya Vinoba Bhave, it was never the Congress's idea of an independent India at all. As far back as the Nehru Report of 1930, the Congress was clear where it wanted India to go: India would be a secular democracy while paying particular attention to equality, social justice and the rule of law. Above all, the Congress (led by Pandit Nehru, "Gandhiji's acolyte") recognized that a modern India would have to be industrial and compete with the rest of the world. Perhaps, inspired by the success of the Soviet five-year plans, industrialization was to be driven (initially at least) by planned government initiatives a.k.a Planning.

The alliance between the INC and Gandhiji arose from a mixture of idealism and pragmatism. The Congress recognized that Gandhiji's methods his unique moral force were unique, a foundation on which a new India could be built. But at no point did the Congress ever adopt Gandhiji's own economic vision. On his side, Gandhiji recognized this implicit bargain. He was the undisputed leader of the movement for India's independence and the Congress' foremost representative but never its architect for India's future. Think about it, at no point in all his negotiations with the British, did Gandhiji ask for simple self-sufficient villages. When Gandhiji negotiated with the British, the essential vision of India in these negotiations was always the same: a free India, with an industrialised economy, driven by a strong public sector, with an emphasis on social justice.

Whether this vision, with its emphasis on a strong public sector, is still the best one for India, is arguable -- planning and the public sector, led to the development of an entrenched and utterly inefficient burreaucracy which choked any kind of growth. But the fact remains, India-- with its surplus of engineers and the easy availabilty of English-speaking persons -- was in a unique position to take advantage of the turn in the post-industrial global economy, particularly the service-sector, because of the decisions made during our "socialist" days.

Of course, the question really is: what next? How do we negotiate the demands of capitalism with the requirements of social justice? Where does the public sector figure in this? Or does it?

europe and the muslims

I was struck by this line in Christopher Caldwell's essay in the Times Magazine After Londonistan. It seems to me to go to the heart of the problem of defining what constitutes a "moderate Muslim". Is it someone who only disavows the means but not the ends of the radicals, the ones who succumb to calls for jihad? Or is it someone who disagrees with the extremists on the means as well as the ends? And if yes, the latter, then how much can they help in maintaining law and order, an important goal in its own right?

Strident political voices are not just admitted to conversation — they are the preferred voices, because they are seen as more "authentic." If the government's top priority is finding people with the street credibility to dissuade potential terrorists, then the ideal Muslim interlocutor is someone who shares the terrorists' goals while publicly condemning their means. Standing up for Holocaust victims and for fellowship among Britain's peoples is not much of a credential.

The question remains: what ends do most Muslims sympathize with generally? And the answers are not very helpful either:

Shariah does not quite command majority support among British Muslims. A poll in February in The Daily Telegraph showed that 40 percent of British Muslims favor the establishment of Islamic law — but only piecemeal, and under certain circumstances. Even in heavily Muslim neighborhoods, there is no great public clamor to ban alcohol — usually a telltale sign of pro-Shariah agitation. And Britain's relaxed laws regarding religious dress — more akin to the American model than to the French — have allowed it to avoid the controversies over the Muslim headscarf that have roiled the rest of Europe. But Mustafa's other claim — that the vast majority of citizens in heavily Muslim Whitechapel sympathize viscerally and overwhelmingly with the radical position on Israel and, more generally, on foreign policy — must be faced squarely. For Mustafa is unquestionably correct.

More reads: An essay in Foreign Affairs. Also this essay on Hamdan Vs Rumsfield which appeared a while ago. What a difference it makes, now that the Supreme Court has made its decision.

linda greenhouse should try fiction!

Linda Greenhouse, the New York Times' reporter for the Supreme Court has this line in her article today on Hamdan vs Rumsfield, the Supreme Court ground-breaking decision on the military tribunals created by the Bush administration, :

In the courtroom on Thursday, the chief justice sat silently in his center chair as Justice Stevens, sitting to his immediate right as the senior associate justice, read from the majority opinion. It made for a striking tableau on the final day of the first term of the Roberts court: the young chief justice, observing his work of just a year earlier taken apart point by point by the tenacious 86-year-old Justice Stevens, winner of a Bronze Star for his service as a Navy officer in World War II.

Wow!

UPDATE: In an otherwise routine round-up of the cases the Supreme Court decided this term (the round-up is routine, the cases are anything but), Greenhouse still goes for this headline: Roberts Is at Court's Helm, but He Isn't Yet in Control . Now that's what I call drama!

what a wonderful description...

The venerable Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic on what he calls the Tower of Pisa Law:

Harari and De Pelegri understand the basic law of farce construction--what I call the Tower of Pisa Law. That tower, contrary to popular belief, did not lean after it was finished: it began to lean when it was only ten meters high, and they kept on building it, logically and well. Good farce writing must start with a canted base and then grow-- grow is the key word -- logically, but at an odd angle. A mere succession of gags is the death of farce: it must move organically, one action resulting inexorably in the next. This is what happens in Only Human.

becektt's hundredth anniversary

From a a beautiful essay in The New York Review on Beckett, this quote from Beckett's second novel, Watt:

Personally of course I regret everything. Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need, not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy, not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust, not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear, not a name, not a face, no time, no place, that I do not regret, exceedingly. An ordure, from beginning to end.

why jane austen was such a good judge of human nature...

Nothing illustrates the almost unlimited European capacity for self-praise than this article in the Los Angeles Times (which I found through this Kevin Drum post). Isn't it neat! -- that while ostensibly praising the American capacity for optimism, Europeans lose no opportunity to congratulate themselves on their "darkness" or "realism" or whatever it is they possess. This quote speaks for itself:

But there is something else too, a quality that is quintessentially American, Scolik said. "In American programs, people have problems, serious problems. In 'Grey's Anatomy,' people are dying, it tells you that life will be very, very hard, but at the very end they get a little hope and there is a way to get through," he said. "In German shows, which we also get on Austrian television, it is mostly a hopeless situation, it is too heavy."

And it only goes to show what I've long believed, that Jane Austen is an unmatched observer of human nature:

"Oh!" cried Miss Bingley, "Charles writes in the most careless way imaginable. He leaves out half his words, and blots the rest."
"My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them--by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents."
"Your humility, Mr. Bingley," said Elizabeth, "must disarm reproof."
"Nothing is more deceitful," said Darcy, "than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast."
"And which of the two do you call my little recent piece of modesty?"
"The indirect boast; for you are really proud of your defects in writing, because you consider them as proceeding from a rapidity of thought and carelessness of execution, which, if not estimable, you think at least highly interesting." [emphasis mine]

on god, mourning and ... racism

Three great pieces from TNR.

James Wood takes on Professor Harold Bloom's new book.

This essay by Rochelle Gurstein, on mourning, stayed in my mind, particularly her final paragraph. Commenting on Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking with C. S. Lewis' A Grief Observed and Donald Hall's volume of poetry Without she says:

Didion's story, then, has reverberations with Lewis's, in that hers, too, reveals how the will is humbled through the experience of suffering. And so by the end of her story she is prepared to accept her husband's words: "You had to go with the change." Given Didion's resourcelessness, which is endemic to this pragmatic and therapeutic age, she has no choice but to find comfort in this rather paltry common wisdom. But, then, without Lewis's spiritual reach or Hall's aesthetic amplitude, is it any wonder that the contemporary experience of grief rarely gets beyond varieties of psychological adjustment?

And finally, Ryan Lizza does an amazing hatchet-job on the Republican 2008 presidential hopeful George Allen. For readers who actually read the whole thing, stick around till the end for a moment that could have been straight out of a Todd Solondz movie. Here it is, in case you don't want to read the piece.

Now the pin seemed even worse. Why would a young man with such a sensitive understanding of Southern racial conflict and no Southern heritage wear a Confederate flag in his formal yearbook photo?

I finally ask him if he remembers the pin, explaining that another of his classmates had the same one in his photo, a guy named Deke. "No," Allen says with a laugh. "Where is this picture?" He leans forward over his desk and tightens his lip around the plug of Copenhagen in his mouth. "Hmmm." He pauses. He speaks slowly, apparently searching his memory. "Well, it's no doubt I was rebellious," he says, "a rebellious kid. I don't know. Unless we were doing something for the fun of it. Deke was from Texas. He was a good friend. Let me think." He stretches back in the chair, his boots sticking out from underneath his desk. "Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. I'll have to find it myself." Another pause. "I don't know. We would probably do things to upset people from time to time."

He stammers some more, says he saw Deke in an airport recently. "I don't know, I don't know," he continues. "It could be some sort of prank, or one of our rebellious--we would do different things. But I remember we liked Texas."

UPDATE: More on George Allen's race problem at TNR here.

on film actors and the stage.

I started reading David Edelstein when he was the film critic for Slate; then he left (or they fired him or something) and joined New York Magazine and I keep reading him (and Slate too -- amazing how we become loyal to people and things we never even know). He has a style of criticism I like, intensely expressive and very personal, a style that obviously descends from the great Pauline Kael. (Edelstein calls himself a "Paulette"). It is a style I wish I could write in. Fastidious literary critics don't like the Kael style since it is clearly imbued with what the New Critics called the "affective fallacy" -- the idea that a piece of art can be explored in terms of the feelings or emotions it arouses in a critic (or anybody else, for that matter). They have a point but Kael is such a joy to read -- so thought-provoking, so annoying, so intensely literary -- that one has to fall under her spell.

In the recent issue of New York, Edelstein has an essay on Julia Roberts' first stage performance, in a Joe Mantello-directed production of Richard Greenberg's Three Days of Rain. I had the opportunity of seeing Greenberg's Take Me Out on Broadway (also directed by Mantello) and that production, with its magnificent performance by Denis O'Hare, introduced me to Greenberg's style -- talky, literary but where language is stretched to breaking point and where words, simply by their presence and their layering, attain heights undreamt of. Edelstein's analysis of Roberts in her first stage-role is not entirely unexpected: Julia is still, well, Julia but she's not quite at home on the stage.

UPDATE: Reviews of Three Days of Rain at the Post and the Times say much the same thing.

(I had the same experience when I saw Ewan McGregor, the man who lit up Moulin Rouge with his voice and the abosolute sincerity of his performance, in a West End production of Guys and Dolls. It's not the McGregor does a disservice to the play, it's just that he's upstaged by all the seasoned theater veterans around him -- who are so at home in their bodies and so good at making their bodies and their voices lenses into the souls of their characters).

two great philosophers disagree...

It's always interesting to find find two philosophers disagreeing -- here Andre Glucksmann and Ronald Dworkin. The issue? Yes, you guessed it: the Danish cartoon controversy.

Here's Dworkin in his thoughtful essay on The Right to Ridicule

Muslims who are outraged by the Danish cartoons note that in several European countries it is a crime publicly to deny, as the president of Iran has denied, that the Holocaust ever took place. They say that Western concern for free speech is therefore only self-serving hypocrisy, and they have a point. But of course the remedy is not to make the compromise of democratic legitimacy even greater than it already is but to work toward a new understanding of the European Convention on Human Rights that would strike down the Holocaust-denial law and similar laws across Europe for what they are: violations of the freedom of speech that that convention demands.

Here's Glucksmann on the same:

Offence for offence? Infringement for infringement? Can the negation of Auschwitz be put on a par with the desecration of Muhammad? This is where two philosophies clash. The one says yes, these are equivalent "beliefs" which have been equally scorned. There is no difference between factual truth and professed faith; the conviction that the genocide took place and the certitude that Muhammad was illuminated by Archangel Gabriel are on a par. The others say no, the reality of the death camps is a matter of historical fact, whereas the sacredness of the prophets is a matter of personal belief.

This distinction between fact and belief is at the heart of Western thought. Aristotle distinguished between indicative discourse on the one hand, which could be used to reach an affirmation or a negation, and prayer on the other. Prayers are not a matter for discussion, because they do not state: they implore, promise, vow and declare. They do not relate information, they perform an act. When the Islamist fanatic affirms that Europeans practise the "religion of the Shoah" while he practises that of Muhammad, he abolishes the distinction between fact and belief. For him there are only beliefs, and so it follows that Europe will favour its own.

Whom do I agree with? In this case, I have to go with Dworkin, his essay almost convinced me that self-restraint is the right thing to do.

essay updates

I remember when I read this article back in the NYT magazine some weeks ago, feeling that there was something I didn't quite like about it. In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley expresses it more eloquently than I could have:

In certain precincts occupied by certain members of the American intelligentsia, it has for some time been quite the fashion to ferret out racists in one's familial woodpile and then to write books about them. The ostensible purpose of these books is to provide intimate, confessional evidence of the degree to which racial prejudice has infiltrated every conceivable corner of American life. Their obvious if unstated purpose is to show how the (white) author has triumphed over his or her sordid ancestral inheritance to become a person of impeccable credentials on matters racial. Though all due modesty and claims of imperfection are expressed, the reader is expected to stand and cheer as, at book's end, the author's heroic achievement is revealed in full.

I had posted earlier about Daniel Mendelsohn's fine review of Brokeback Mountain. Producer James Schamus responds to Mendelsohn, in what I must say, is an extraordinarily dishonest letter.

I am not radical enough to insist that it was the film-makers' duty to market Brokeback Mountain as a "gay" film; after all, their first priority is that the film does well, that it recover it's costs. If that involves toning down the gay elements in the publicity stills, so be it. But surely there's nothing wrong in admitting that; the only ones offended will be radicals and the film is good enough to appeal to everyone. But Schamus insists on having his cake and eating it too -- he name-drops terms from queer theory, just to appeal to people who believe in it, and he talks about the "universality of love". But the best line has to be this:

And it is true that we have marketed the film primarily as an epic, sweeping romance between two men, and do not append the words "gay" or "homosexual" to our marketing blurbs for the movie (although you never saw a poster or ad telling you that either Titanic or The Bridges of Madison County was the "greatest straight love story of all time").

This is a breathtaking statement. Of course, the fact that the word "straight" isn't used to describe Titanic does not mean that the movie doesn't advertise its straightness. (There is the fact that the only people who use the word "straight" or "heterosexual" are gay men; straight people don't really think of themselves as straight). I will only quote Mendelsohn's response here and then get off the topic once and for all:

With breathtaking disingenuousness, given his ostensible commitment to queer theory, Mr. Schamus suggests that Brokeback shouldn't advertise the sexuality of its characters any more than straight mainstream films do. But of course, those films do advertise, relentlessly, the heterosexuality of their characters—as even a quick glance at the posters used to advertise, say, Titanic and The Bridges of Madison County will confirm. There, one can see what is, after all, the standard visual representation of erotic love between two people, which is a clear image of two yearning lovers embracing. One wonders why, if Focus Features is so open, proud, and celebratory of its film's homosexual love story, such an image is utterly absent from its print and TV ads for the movie—just as the open, unashamed, and insistent use of the word "gay" is absent from the producers' promotional rhetoric, starting with the pages—any and all of them—of the press kit.

Finally two fascinating articles from the Post and the Times here and here.

Quote of the day

Majikthise talking about the responses to Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell

What if it became widely accepted that religions are the biological equivalent of masturbation--"hacks" that we have learned to perform on our own bodies to achieve transcendence on demand?

I plan to put up a detailed post on Dennet and Breaking the Spell soon (not that I've read the book but there are just fascinating issues lurking there).

on environmentalism

In a fine review of Michael Grunwald's The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise, which traces the vexed environmental history of Florida, Greg Easterbrook ends with some thought-provoking words:

Closing this fine book, I had a small complaint and a big complaint. The small one is that The Swamp takes numerous potshots at the developers and amusement-park builders who crowded into Florida, but dodges an important aspect of economic growth that affluence makes possible: environmental protection. Townhomes can be tacky, and freeway congestion is infuriating; but the global population is expanding, and people must live somewhere. If environmentally destructive development (which is the story of most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) makes possible environmentally clean development (which has been happening roughly since the mid-1980s), the outcome is high living standards plus a respect for nature. And that is a good outcome.

My big complaint is that Grunwald's analysis of human interaction with the Everglades reflects what I once called the Fallacy of Environmental Correctness. The Swamp presents the pre-European-contact condition of Florida as correct in some first-causes sense, while implying that all human tampering with the Everglades was an offense against the proper order of things. Since the human lifespan is less than a century, we tend to think of environmental conditions as fixed. Yet when they were first seen by the conquistadors in the sixteenth century, the Everglades were just the latest variation on an endlessly changing natural landscape, created rather recently in geological terms and certain to be altered many more times in the future, whether humanity acted or not.

Not that long ago, much of North America was buried under an ice sheet, and what is now the Everglades region was drastically different. Step back further, into the Oligocene Epoch, and North America was arid, with no marshlands to protect. Step further back and Earth's temperatures were much higher than today; the birds of the current Everglades could not have lived at Florida latitudes in hotter prior eras. Or think about the future: even were there no Homo sapiens, a few thousand years into the future, the Everglades are sure to transform in unpredictable ways. There is no "correct" condition for a land area or biosphere. There is only the condition that happens to obtain at the moment. Given that humanity arises from the natural scheme, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with our monkeying around with nature. Some of this monkeying fulfills our purposes as moral and historical agents--if it is done wisely, as Michael Grunwald has persuasively shown.

Quote of the day:

Dana Stevens in Slate:

Finally, one open question to both of you: Why is Heath Ledger's performance in Brokeback Mountain considered a leading role, while Jake Gyllenhaal's is relegated to the status of 'supporting'? They share roughly equivalent portions of screen time, and Gyllenhaal certainly has more lines, if only because his character is far chattier than the taciturn Ennis Del Mar. It's hard to imagine one of the two leads being similarly dissed in a love story between a man and a woman. Is this just because the academy wanted to avoid pitting the two men against one another in the best actor category? Or is Gyllenhaal smiting his forehead right now for agreeing to be cast as the bottom to Ledger's top?

Hee hee.

where is bin laden?

The Washington Post's latest Sunday Outlook Section has some good essays on Osama Bin Laden. A brief summary from Slate's indispensable Today's Papers:

Ahmed Rashid affirms there that Bin Laden is hiding in Pakistan, where the government isn't doing enough to catch him. Besides offering a monetary reward, which they don't need since money is not scarce, officials aren't doing enough to convince Pashtuns to stop hiding him. Peter Bergen explains why it has been so difficult to catch Bin Laden and emphasizes that capturing him is still important, even if it's just for psychological reasons. He also theorizes that Bin Laden might not really be on the run, as is often speculated, but might, in fact, be hunkered down somewhere. John Brennan says that the United States is focusing too much on Bin Laden's strategy, which is terrorism, and not enough on his vision of global domination.

Some interesting sections from Brennan's article, which has some good points:

Bin Laden has also insidiously convinced us to use terminology that lends legitimacy to his activities. He has hijacked the term "jihad" to such an extent that U.S. and other Western officials regularly use the terms "jihadist" and "terrorist" interchangeably. In doing so, they unwittingly transfer the religious legitimacy inherent in the concept of jihad to murderous acts that are anything but holy. [...]

Leaders of Islamic countries, organizations and local communities have most of the burden, as well as the best chance, of steering Muslim hearts and minds away from bin Laden's world vision. Yet while most distance themselves from his terrorist acts, their penchant for engaging in fiery rhetoric castigating the West helps breed greater intolerance of non-Muslims. The wide disparity between the haves and have-nots in the Middle East also fuels the fires of Islamic activism.