Only one thing, apparently, is more natural than to be appalled by violence against someone else’s child: to embrace one’s own child all the more tightly.
Only one thing, apparently, is more natural than to be appalled by violence against someone else’s child: to embrace one’s own child all the more tightly.
“Terrorism” is a term not just for a set of tactics that instil fear, but for defiance of “civil”-ized norms. The latter do not deny the moral calculus of an Osama Bin Laden: They seek to limit and move beyond its inexorable and inexorcisable normalcy or naturalness – in wartime at least second nature, if not human nature itself. That the logic of war is a collectivizing, anonymous logic explains why liberalism-individualism seeks to criminalize it, why liberalist-individualist polities have such difficulty orienting themselves morally within it, and why they are, finally, prone to overcompensating in response to it.
Fred Kaplan’s critique of Israeli strategy or supposed strategic failures seems to be what Middle East scholar Michael Hanna has in mind when he urges us (on Twitter today) to consider an alternative view: Let’s be frank: we often talk…
What other than the actual invasion of Iraq under proven-false premises could actually prove those premises false, at least as we articulated them to ourselves while, we believed, safely ignoring the always-wrong and resoundingly re-defeated defeatists?
A piece of political concept art may not be God’s frustration of Mephistopheles – the evil one condemned to achieve good despite himself – but neither is it exactly entirely not-that.
1. Intro by way of a response to Mr. Halasz at the Crooked Timber thread: @239: The Wikipedia entry on Kahn is a good capsule summary. I often wonder why, given that he’s a distinguished professor at Yale (not some…
(proofread version of comment at Crooked Timber) Mr. Timberman @125 [Italics in original comment], “converting freedom into political [or any kind of] obligation” appears to translate as “converting freedom into its opposite.” If I’m obligated to you and yours at…
The Roosevelt-Marshall welfare-warfare state and the global regime it fought and worked into existence remain intact but under pressure. They still depend on an ability to project beyond themselves, both economically as well as militarily, and both morally as well as practically.