Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2548

The Manufactured Misfit? Ctd

Alex Needham insists that Paglia "missed the point by a mile":

Paglia's main criticism seemed to be that Gaga simply isn't sexy enough. "How would a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation?" she asked. But Lady Gaga has never presented herself as a sex object. She sells weirdness and eye-popping spectacle, not sex. She isn't posing in a meat bikini to woo Nuts' one-handed readers, and...

The View From Your Window

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 4.30 pm

Argentina - Buenos Aires - South America - Provinces - Buenos Aires City

The Untamed Prince, Ctd

Scott Horton looks at the real reason the Obama administration went so far to deny any day in court for torture victims - even using unclassified evidence alone:

The Holder Justice Department would have us believe that it is protecting state secrets essential to our security. That posture is risible, and half of the court saw through it. The dilemma faced by the Justice Department was rather that evidence presented in the suit would likely be used in the future (not in the United States...

Beating Rent Control

Greg Mankiw explains a scheme used by some universities in New York City:

1. The university buys a rent-controlled building
purchase price is low, because the existing landlord cannot make
money renting it.

2. The university then rents the apartments to its own seniorfaculty, who view this as a great perk. In essence, the differencebetween the free-market rent and the controlled rent is a form ofcompensation for the professor. As a result, the university can reducethe professor's...

HUMINT And The Drone War

Greg Scoblete counters Joshua Foust:

By all accounts, the U.S. is running a fairly aggressive drone campaign against
al-Qaeda and the Taliban inside Pakistan without anywhere near the same
number of troops on the ground that we currently have in Afghanistan.
If we don't need 100,000-plus coalition troops inside Pakistan to wage
an effective drone war against al-Qaeda there, why do we need them in
Afghanistan?

Pakistan - al-Qaeda - Afghanistan - United States - War in Afghanistan ...

American Non-Exceptionalism, Ctd

Felix Salmon responds to Bill Easterly. Salmon thinks that inequality "increasingly [ignores:] national borders":

Once upon a time, national borders were useful boundaries to use when
measuring per-capita income across the planet. And given that
statistical agencies are still national, that's not going to change any
time soon. But those numbers are going to be less and less informative
as pockets of wealth spring up in poor countries, and pockets of
poverty persist in middle-income nations.

...

Question For The Day

A reader writes:

In a country founded by Washington, Adams, Paine, Hale, and Jefferson, how can we have reached a point where it has become a slur to call someone an "anti-colonialist"?

Washington - Thomas Jefferson - United States - Jefferson - Country music

The Iraq War And Islamic Terrorism, Ctd

Frum corrects:

I should have said "most pervasive" not "worst." The French violence
involved the greatest number of participants, but the Madrid train
station bombing of 2004 and the London public transit bombing of 2005
claimed the most victims.

London - Madrid - Iraq War - Iraq - Islamic terrorism

The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish, Andrew explained the origins of his own faith, in advance of the Pope's visit to the UK. He expected something better from the right's best and brightest, Yuval Levin. The Missoulian was sick of Sarah's smears and the Republican echo chamber got louder over at Fox News. Obama was not a Kenyan anti-colonialist but he was a voice of sanity and reason in a world unwilling to hear it. We debated intellectual honesty and discovered that Instapundit sure had changed a lot since S...

Face Of The Day

A Christian man hangs a banner depicting of Jesus Christ in front of a towering cross on the eve of the Elevation of the Holy Cross, in the village of Qanat Bekish, in the Lebanese mountains 1,800 metres of above sea level on September 13, 2010. Lebanon's Maronite Christian church inaugurated the cross that stands 73.8 meters tall. The cross, which will be lit up with 1,800 lights, was built on a mountain near a church constructed in 1898. Building the cross took about two years and...