March 13th, 2005
CHANGES MAY BE COMING SOON TO ZENPUNDIT
I’m close to giving up on Blogger as a home for Zenpundit based partly upon recent frustrations and some good advice from Sir Francis Younghusband of Coming Anarchy fame. Having heard all-too accurate tech related criticisms in the past from such worthies as praktike, Mithras and P6 among others, I have to face facts – since my days usually run around 19 hours, the chances of me fitting in the extra time to learn the tech angle better isn’t going to happen soon and I should accept help from someone who knows what they are doing. Help that Younghusband has been kind enough to offer.
I have some basic information to check out first, but I envision going this route soon. Many thanks to Younghusband and those of you who have been steadily prodding me in this direction.
March 13th, 2005
RECOMMENDED READING [Updated]
Intriguing ideas from the depths of the Blogosphere ( though primarily my blogroll)
A big Zenpundit Welcome to the Eide Neurolearning Blog ! ENB is run by Fernette and Brock Eide a husband and wife team of M.D.’s who specialize in working with children with learning disabilities. I first became aware of ENB via BusinessPundit and Corante and came way impressed with the Brock’s theories of learning and brain function which strongly correlate with my own experience and research. Check out their latest post on Buddhist meditation and brain wave function!
Stuart Berman has a a typically thoughtful post up on IT security, relationships, politics and culture. A nice synthesis of issues. Lots of links too. I’ve been trying to cajole a comment out of Stu on quantum encryption issues but without success thus far ;o)
Changes at The Asia Pages. The lovely, world-travelling, founder Jodi has retired from blogging. I was sad to read about her departure as The Asia Pages had really started to come into its own in the last year when Jodi began adding more real-world social observations as a Korean-American expatriate, to the politics and econ of modernizing Asia. Jodi’s handpicked successor, ” Bluejives” is bringing a new take and visually skillful presentation to The Asia Pages and I encourage you to keep abreast of how the blog evolves under Bluejives direction.
Colonel Austin Bay interviews former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Aside from being a highly intelligent writer, Bay represents the intersection of professional journalism, blogging and active-duty military service ( Bay just completed, I believe, a tour in Iraq).
Flaming Duck on how ” do something ” drives government growth. Plus, I just like the name
” Flaming Duck”.
UPDATE:
Cole and Collounsbury: Collounsbury offers his take on Sunni-Shiite violence prompted by Juan Cole’s views on the same.
(It also just occurred to me in writing this post that sometime I really should decide on a consistent model of transliteration for Arabic to English. For example, I use ” al Qaida” which also pops up in the media as ” al Qai’ada”, ” al Qae’ada” and ” al Qaeda”. Likewise, I generally, I write ” Hezbollah” and not ” Hizbullah” or ” Hezb’ ullah” though not for any reason other than habit and I have no idea of ” al Qaida” is consistent in usage style with ” Hezbollah” . Collounsbury often uses a Francophone influenced model while Cole does not. Any thoughts here are welcome since Arabic seems to have less of a transliteration consensus among linguists than, say, Chinese, with most MSM outlets using the Pinyin system )
March 13th, 2005
JOHN BOYD, IRAQ AND THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
In the April issue of The Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows draws attention to the followers of strategist John Boyd – Chet Richards, G.I. Wilson and Greg Wilcox – who maintain the excellent site Defense and the National Interest. Specifically, Fallows recommends reading their ” Fourth Generation Warfare and OODA Loop: Implications of the Iraqi Insurgency” report.
The thrust of the Fallows piece is adopting a culturally coherent counterinsurgency strategy for the United States in Iraq. Much of it includes advice the Bush administration should have been following a year ago and seems to belatedly be adopting some of today.
March 12th, 2005
A CONSERVATIVE LAMENTS THE DECLINE OF LIBERALISM
The learned and conservative historian, John Lukacs, had a fine essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education a few months back assessing the cultural costs of Liberalism’s slow political decline and finds that society has been impoverished because without liberalism, democracy becomes mere populism ( Hat tip, RJ Rummel at Democratic Peace ).
Lukacs is an always interesting writer. First, his scholarship is a throwback to the days before the history profession became enamored with trivialities and esoteric niche specialties. He is in his field, broad, deep, in command of the historiography, but not bound by it. Nor is he afraid to put forward unpopular or controversial thoughts. An excerpt:
“When it came to the formation of the democracies of the West, the concepts of liberalism and democracy, while not inseparable, were surely complementary, with the emphasis on the former. Among the founders of the American republic were serious men who were more dubious about democracy than about liberty. They certainly did not believe in — indeed, they feared — populism; populism that, unlike a century ago, has now become (and not only in the United States) the political instrument of “conservatives,” of so-called men of the “Right.” It is significant that in Europe, too, the appeal of the term “liberal” has declined, while “democratic” is the adopted name of a variety of parties, many of them not only antiliberal but also extreme right-wing nationalist.
Yes, democracy is the rule of the majority; but there liberalism must enter. Majority rule must be tempered by the rights of minorities and of individual men and women; but when that temperance is weak, or unenforced, or unpopular, then democracy is nothing else than populism. More precisely: Then it is nationalist populism. It may be that the degeneration of liberal democracy to populism will be the fundamental problem of the future. True, many liberals have contributed to the inflation — the degeneration — of the original meaning of “liberal.” But the acceptance of the word “liberal” as a connotation of something damnable, unhealthy, and odious is to be deplored.”
American liberalism, in my view, never recovered from the crisis of confidence it suffered from the debacle of the Vietnam War. The ” Best and the Brightest”, the Bundy and McNamara type liberals who served JFK and LBJ lost the nerve to stand up to the anti-democratic, anti-American, New Left that savagely damned them for being warmongering racists. An echo of which you can see today when leftist yahoos on the internet castigate moderate liberals like Joe Lieberman as ” Republican Lite” and Hillary Clinton as a ” war criminal “.
With some exceptions, most liberals today do not have the stomach to stand up to the authoritarian, reactionary, Left like the Adolf Berles, Harry Trumans, Arthur Schlesingers, John Kennedys and Hubert Humphreys did of old. It is easier to stand with them against Tom DeLay than to notice that they, as liberals, have little else in common with the apologists for squalid third world dictatorships. It is a bad bargain for liberalism, for the wingnuts add nothing to the alliance other than the disadvantages of extremism but they gain political respectability from their public association with honorable liberals.
It is hard to remember today how dominant liberalism once was as an American creed. Harry Truman, his party split on the Right and Left wings by dissenting factions, still crushed Thomas Dewey who himself was not exactly a conservative. ( Strom Thurmond, the rebel Dixiecrat in 1948, had previously been notorious among rabid segregationists for his relative liberality on
” the Negro question”. Even the Southern racists felt compelled to put forward a “liberal”). After Watergate in 1974 the G.OP. was dangerously close to going the way of the Whigs and Ronald Reagan was then widely viewed as something of a nut, like Goldwater.
Those days are gone.
