Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2715
July 26, 2010
The Language Of Faith, Ctd
A reader writes:
I am responding to your post on the need for a renewal of religious language to capture religious experience. This was the precise problem I was engaged in trying to resolve before I lost my faith entirely and went to law school. Very early on it struck me that the crisis of faith in my own experience was a crisis of language that obfuscated spiritual reality. It seemed that the mystical traditions of both Catholicism, certain forms of Buddhism and Islam had struggled...
When Waterboarding Is "Torture"
From the AP:
"DuringAmerican exceptionalism in the neocon era: the right to do what we forbid others from doing.
the 77-day proceedings, Duch admitted to overseeing the deaths of up to
16,000 people who passed through the prison's gates. Torture used to
extract confessions included pulling out prisoners' toenails,
administering electric shocks and waterboarding."
Prison - Torture - United States - Pol Pot - Khmer Rouge
Orwell: Obsolete
George Orwell - Animal Farm - Elton John - Billy Elliot - Shopping
The Unwinnable War II: Didn't We Know All This Already?
What do we really learn from the Wikileaks monster-doc-dump? I think the actual answer is: not much that we didn't already know. But it's extremely depressing - and rivetingly explicit - confirmation of what anyone with eyes and ears could have told you for years. We already know the following:
The notion that a professional military and especially police force can be constructed and trained by the West to advance the interests of a "national government" in Kabul within any time frame...
The Unwinnable War I: Wikileaks Reax
What does it mean to tell the truth about a war? Is it a lie,technically speaking, for the Administration to say that it has faithin Hamid Karzai's government and regards him as a legitimate leader—oris it just absurd? Is it a lie to say that we have a plan forAfghanistan that makes any sense at all? If you put it that way, eachof the WikiLeaks documents—from an account of an armed showdown betweenthe Afghan police and the Afghan Army, to a few lines about a localinterdiction...
The Flip-Side Of Meritocracy, Ctd
Jonah Lehrer - Business - Proust Was a Neuroscientist - How We Decide - New Yorker
How Facebook Is Like Television
Since TV was invented, critics have pointed out the dangers of watching the perfect people who seem to inhabit the screen. They are almost universally beautiful, live in interesting places, do interesting work (if they work at all), are unfailingly witty, and never have to do any cleaning. They never even need to use the toilet. It cannot be psychologically healthy to compare yourself to these phantasms.So it's interesting that social networks have inadvertently...
Towards Economic Humility
Gregory Mankiw has a long wonky article on the stimulus:
The question for economists now is whether the administration'sassumptions, and the model based on them, were correct. After all, ifwe could be sure their model was right, we would know what to concludewhen their stimulus plan was followed by 10% unemployment: The patientwas sicker than they thought, and unemployment would surely have beenhigher still if not for the stimulus. (Indeed, since Obama's advisorsdo believe their model was...
Andrew Sullivan's Blog
- Andrew Sullivan's profile
- 153 followers
