Decius wrote:

US Ambassador John Bolton said there was no moral equivalence between the civilian casualties from the Israeli raids in Lebanon and those killed in Israel from "malicious terrorist acts".

U:I've decided to revise this post. I reacted too strongly to this comment.

I'm sitting on a train trying to write this out with my sidekick. We'll see how well this goes. Its been a busy day.

The violence going on in the Middle East right now is senseless. Isreal is defending itself from action that seems to have no strategic purpose at all. Hezbollah certainly intends to kill civilians, and their strikes are unprovoked, unwarranted, and ultimately, self destructive. Isreal has both a right and a need to defend themselves.

Having said that, Stratfor warned that Isreal would attempt to punish the Lebanese people, in hopes of making them resent Hezbollah. Its a long term strategy. Isreal will likely demolish Hezbollah's operational capacity in the coming weeks. However, they can't destroy it culturally... So they want, in theory, to teach the people of Lebanon a lesson so that they won't support Hezbollah in the future.

That's not ok, legally, or morally. The use of violence to apply political pressure to an innocent civilian population is definition of terrorism. Its particularly concerning when the population has, at best, a tangental relationship to your enemy.

It appears that this may have occurred. Some commentators have painted civilian deaths as an unfortunate side effect of war. However, some have observed that a portion of the strikes appear to be beyond the scope of what would be needed to suport a ground invasion targetted at Hezbollah. Its unclear. If its true, its wrong. Period.

No international leader is going to call Isreal out on it if it is true, due to the geopolitical implications if it were concluded that it was true. Bolton picked poor wording here. The mere fact that Isreal is defending itself does not mean they they are absolved of responsibility for civilian deaths, particularly when those deaths are intentional.

What international leaders have done is call for restraint. They have done this because they are concerned that civilians are needlessly being killed, and because the scope of the infrastructural damage is so severe that it threatens to undermine the sustainability of Lebanon as a state.

I think unwarranted strikes on Lebanese civilians help, not hurt, Hezbollah culturally. The Shia in particular see Hezbollah as their protectors from these kinds of attacks. Furthermore, the International Community baddly wants to see Lebanon come back into the fold. If the present, weak, government is unable to sustain control over the country as a result of the damage that Isreal does, this will open up the door for Syria, and Shia extremeists, to come back into power there. Everyone, but especially Isreal, looses if this happens.

No doubt these are some of the reasons that we haven't seen a ground invasion yet and the west is engaged in serious diplomatic efforts. However, Stratfor thinks a ground invasion is inevitable. We should hope that the civilian impact, and the impact on the Lebanese government, are minimal, and that Isreal is able to secure their homeland. However, we should not serve as apologists if things get out of hand. There are moral rules here even if we know that Hezbollah will disregard them.

yes (plus i'm pleased you revised your earlier post which did strike me as intemperate, not wrong but ...this is much more thoughtful and I would certainly agree with the conclusion)

RE: Lebanon civilian deaths morally not same as terror victims -- Bolton - Yahoo! News

"I'll be a couple of minutes late" translates as anything up to 15 minutes after the agreed time. "I'll be 15 minutes late" translates as anything up to half an hour. "I'm running very late" means it might be time to look for more punctual friends.

We have what's called "Vicky time" in our office. On time to her means 15 minutes-30 minutes late. She's also constantly on her phone or blackberry and seriously addicted to it. I adore the woman--she's hysterical and awesome at what she does. But sometimes, I want to rip the cell phone/blackberry out of her hands and throw it into the bottom of Lake Washington.

~Heathyr

recommended if only because Heathyr's comments made me laugh

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Manners on the move

This tracks names by boys and girls based on popularity (birth) - type in any name and see the rise and fall. Using data like this it looks like you could predict someone's age +/- 5 years just based on the popularity of their name. Try it out with the names of people you know.

Names visualizer (Java)

Many boomer parents carefully planned and fiercely protected their children, according to Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, by Neil Howe and William Strauss.
They saw their youngsters as "special," and they sheltered them. Parents outfitted their cars with Baby on Board stickers. They insisted their children wear bicycle helmets, knee pads and elbow guards. They scheduled children's every hour with organized extracurricular activities. They led the PTA and developed best-friend-like relationships with their children, says Mastrodicasa, co-author of a book on millennials.

Dear Mom and Dad,
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for not doing ANY of the above!
Love,
Your well-adjusted adult daughter.

Mommy, tell my professor he's not nice!

Jack, if you’re going to pick up girls from out of town, you could pick a better venue than the Pride parade. That’s all we’re saying.

I was thinking this might be better in humor but it's really both, so...

Republican Strategists, Sex, MySpace, and Pride: A Heartwarming DC Tale - Wonkette

Jello wrote:

In defense against the charge that he himself helped initiate the Bush Administration's revolutionary attitude to spreading democracy, Fukuyama stresses in his latest book that The End of History described a democratic capitalist version of an anti-Leninist Marxian approach--stressing slow cultural, social and economic change, not sudden revolution. He maintains that he is a Gramscian, emphasizing the intellectual and cultural hegemony of capitalist democracy, not claiming that it would inevitably work well everywhere or solve all problems. By contrast, he describes the Bush Administration as having become "Leninist" in its belief that history can be subjected to violent pushes.

Fukuyama Tukutama Fukyama Honeymama

nice
i do like the idea that the Bush admin is "Leninist"
question though is being a Leninist automatically wrong?
u live in a country born out of revolution (the first successful one against the British Empire)
1917 was a disaster
1789 went wrong in 1792
the English Civil War and Cromwell's Protectorate led to the velvet revolution of 1688, the beginning of constitutional/parliamentary government and produced John Locke
does history sometimes needs to be pushed?
certainly the american revolution was a great leap forward for liberalism
i think the division between Leninism bad and incrementalism good is rigid and dogmatic
"history" like evolution lurches "forward" sometimes through sudden sifts. There are sudden changes in the fossil record: sudden explosions of diversity: all is not a steady incremental march forward: sometimes there are siasmic sifts which are not down to disaster but rather innovation genetically (or memetically in the case of "history")
feminism is both a revolutionary break with the past and an intellectual tradition with a long history so the changes wrought in the 60s may be regarded as evolutionary. Or even if it was a revolution it might be argued that it was the overturning of a moribound hegemony (and so we're back with Gramsci).

RE: The Two Fukuyamas | The National Interest

The tin foil hat crowd has always assumed that the NSA was either directly monitoring domestic communications in the US, or at least that a foreign ally was doing it and sharing the results with them. This never really bothered me, because I assumed that the NSA wouldn't care about anything I would ever do. The NSA is mostly concerned with warfare, in which the rules of civil society don't really apply, and the only rules that matter are the ones prohibiting genocide and sadistic treatment of people. If I was ever interested in commiting espionage on behalf of a nation state, I would assume that all the rules were off and I would act accordingly.

The problem is that terrorism breaks down the barriers between what was once the domain of war and the domain of law enforcement. In the wake of 9/11 we have vigorously engaged in information sharing between domestic law enforcement and intelligence. So, wereas we might not have a problem with the NSA spying domestically in the context where they are really only looking for Soviet Spies, our feeling might be different if they are really looking for anything illegal, and sharing that information with local authorities. What we have now is somewhere in the middle, and its likely to erode further.

The minute someone says that we could have caught such and such a child abuser or murderer if the NSA had only shared the information with the police, its over. They'll start sharing it, and they'll share more and more, and you'll have the surveillance state.

Some people embrace this. They figure it is inevitable. It probably is. And they figure they aren't going to break the law, so why should they worry. I think our system often produces the wrong laws, and too many of them, and whats more, the aura of omnipresent suspicion and fear that accompanies the knowledge of the panopticon of the police state sucks the life right out of a culture. Its no longer reasonable to conceive of such a place as a "free country."

Whats worse, it is inevitable as these loopholes widen and the information sharing spreads that these systems will be used for political and economic manipulation, criminally.

This is the challenge our generation faces. How can you avoid creating a police state in an environment litered with terrorists and murderers and child abusers when omnipotent technology is at hand and it can help fight them? Is it even possible?

Its not about the surveillance...

As the investigation proceeded, Zarifa Dzhabieva, a former translator for the American embassy was found knifed to death in her own home. Whoever killed Dzhabieva ransacked her dwelling looking for something, even though none of the victim's valuables had been touched. Dzhabieva was under investigation for aiding and abetting the issuing of visas and forged documents to girls destined for the U.S. sex trade.

Wow, this qualifies as completely weird, but after the Homeland Security pedophillia mess, why not a little slavery?

not weird at all it is just that certain dark realities such as the global trade in women for sex rarely breaks the surface and into the light

of course some people will commit murder to protect a lucrative business its a trade old as the hills and far older than the drugs trade

United Press International - Security & Terrorism - US recalls ambassador to Azerbaijan

Michiko Kakutani calls Fukuyama's new book "tough-minded and edifying."

In "America at the Crossroads," Mr. Fukuyama questions the assertion made by the prominent neoconservatives Mr. Kristol and Robert Kagan in their 2000 book "Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy" that other nations "find they have less to fear" from the daunting power of the United States because "American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality." The problem with this doctrine of "benevolent hegemony," Mr. Fukuyama points out, is that "it is not sufficient that Americans believe in their own good intentions; non-Americans must be convinced of them as well."

That's where the General Memetics Corporation comes into the picture.

Fukuyama writes:

"Bureaucratic tribalism exists in all administrations, but it rose to poisonous levels in Bush's first term. Team loyalty trumped open-minded discussion, and was directly responsible for the administration's failure to plan adequately for the period after the end of active combat."

NYT Review of 'America at the Crossroads,' by Francis Fukuyama

The impending legal battles put us on the verge of repeating the last two decades of the abortion war: anti-abortion victory, abortion rights backlash. At the end of the cycle 20 years from now, we'll be right back where we are today. Unless, that is, we find a way out.

Gold star.

Life After Roe