Why not ignore them?

Ok, this is my last word on this silly Koran burning business.

People have every right to burn the Koran if they want to, just as they have the right to build community centers wherever they want provided they comply with zoning laws. But instead of ignoring such a small issue, we have the absurd spectacle of even President Obama and General Petraeus getting into the act and calling for the priest to desist because of Muslim sensitivities. Don’t they realize that you can never placate hypersensitive people? If not this, it will be something else that inflames those who are quick to anger at any perceived affront, whatever their religion.

What is the matter with Obama that he feels he has to insert himself into these trivial issues, like he did before with the Henry Louis Gates affair? Doesn’t he have real work to do like deal with unemployment? By speaking on this he is simply begging for some other publicity seeker to think up some new scheme to grab the headlines.

Update: The burning has been canceled.

The New War Between Science and Religion

(This article of mine was published on May 19, 2010 in The Chronicle of Higher Education.)

There is a new war between science and religion, rising from the ashes of the old one, which ended with the defeat of the antievolution forces in the 2005 “intelligent design” trial. The new war concerns questions that are more profound than whether or not to teach evolution. Unlike the old science-religion war, this battle is going to be fought not in the courts but in the arena of public opinion. The new war pits those who argue that science and “moderate” forms of religion are compatible worldviews against those who think they are not.
[Read more…]

An inside look at election coverage

Labor Day used to be the traditional kick off for political campaigns though we now live in nonstop, year-round campaign mode. But as we approach election day in November, we should steel ourselves for an even increased focus on the trivial and sensational. If you want to better understand why election coverage is so vapid, see Michael Hastings’s excellent GQ article Hack: Confessions of a Presidential Campaign Reporter on his experience in the 2008 elections. (Hastings is the reporter whose story in Rolling Stone resulted in General Stanley McChrystal being fired from his job in charge of the war in Afghanistan.) In 2007, Hastings was assigned by Newsweek to cover the front runners in the 2008 election and his increasing disgust with the kind of access politics that was required resulted in him quitting midway through and moving to another beat.

The attempt to counter WikiLeaks

In order to minimize the impact of the WikiLeaks expose, the government is trying to adopt a ‘move along, nothing new to see here’ message, hoping that the major media will drop the matter. But Nick Turse lists what he calls five ‘jaw-dropping’ stories to emerge from WikiLeaks release of documents that he says demand national media attention.

Scott Horton describes how what he calls the ‘national-security state’ is striking back at this latest threat to its information hegemony. Establishment journalists are tut-tutting about how WikiLeaks is being irresponsible by simply releasing secret documents without ‘editing’ them (which is just an euphemism for letting the governments decide what should be published) or ‘providing context’ (which means putting the government’s spin on them).

As part of the anti-WikiLeaks propaganda effort, Admiral Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, claims that WikiLeaks may have “blood on its hands” because of the leaks. This is truly rich since it comes from someone whose forces have killed tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of innocent civilians in their invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Maximillian Forte has a good analysis on the benefits of the WikiLeaks release as well as on some of the concerns. The most serious one that is being used to discredit WikiLeaks is the lack of redaction of the names of Afghan informants who may now face reprisals at the hands of the brutal Taliban. It is not clear if the sheer volume of documents overwhelmed the small WikiLeaks staff or they were just careless or whether it was deliberate. But it now turns out that WikiLeaks asked for help from the US government to provide reviewers to tell them what names should be redacted and they were rebuffed. WikiLeaks asked the New York Times reporter to act as an intermediary to convey this request and the reporter did so even as the paper condemned WikiLeaks for not doing the redacting. This is typical New York Times behavior, always seeking to ingratiate itself with the government by dutifully relaying their spin.

WikiLeaks has again offered the US government the opportunity to review the second set of documents before their release to enable them to identify the names of informants that should be redacted. It looks like the government has again chosen to refuse the offer. Thus the US government shares considerable responsibility for any danger that befalls their informants. As Glenn Greenwald says:

In the conflict between the U.S. Government and WikiLeaks, it is true that one of the parties seems steadfastly indifferent to the lives of Afghan civilians. Despite the very valid criticisms that more care should have been exercised before that first set of documents was released, the party most guilty of that indifference is not WikiLeaks.
…
For whatever reasons — because it wanted WikiLeaks to release the documents with the names of Afghan sources to damage its credibility, because it was indifferent to the potential harm — the Pentagon simply failed to pursue that option [of reviewing the documents and suggesting redactions], just as it is doing now with the next 15,000 documents. Are those the actions of officials with any genuine concern for the harm to Afghan civilians, other than to the extent it be can exploited to harm its arch-enemy, WikiLeaks?

It seems pretty clear that the US government is lying (as usual) in its efforts to discredit WikLeaks. But its long history of lying is so great that only the establishment US press takes it seriously or at least pretends to do so.

Will the effort to shut down WikiLeaks succeed? There is always the chance that it might, given the power and ruthlessness of the US government. But WikiLeaks is nothing if not resourceful. They have exploited sophisticated computer encryption technology to elude investigators. Assange has also now become now a columnist for a Swedish newspaper, thus giving him journalist status and enabling him to take advantage of the strong protections that country provides journalists.

But whatever happens to WikiLeaks, they have shown the world that there is another model of journalism that is far more powerful than what we have now, and that does not require journalists to ingratiate and debase themselves towards powerful figures. It is interesting that younger people (those under 50) are more likely to see the WikiLeaks disclosure as serving the public interest than those over 50. I am hopeful that young and idealistic aspiring journalists, people who really care about getting the truth out there, will find Assange and WikiLeaks and even Bradley Manning, with their vaguely outlaw personas, hacker histories, and nose-thumbing at those in power, to be far more romantic and appealing role models than the toadying, well-coiffed crop that follows the Watergate model and are the ones that now show up on TV and in government and military press briefing rooms and spout platitudes in support of the government.

If I was an idealistic young man starting out as a journalist, I know which model I would choose.

File this under things that are unlikely to turn out well

An evangelical church in Florida is threatening to burn 200 copies of the Koran on September 11, “to honor those who were murdered” in 2001. The priest behind this effort says that the goal is “to send a message to al-Qaida.” Of course, the ‘message’ that will be received is that there really is a war between Christians and Muslims.

We will be lucky if the only retaliation is that some equally crazy Muslims somewhere in the world burn 200 copies of the Bible. But if the Muslims up the ante and burn more than 200 Bibles, we may have an escalation that results in all religious books being burned.

What is it about religion that inspires crazy behavior on the part of its most ardent devotees?

Stephen Hawking on the universe and god

Recently religious apologists have taken to harping on the question “How can something come from nothing?” because they think that science cannot explain how the universe came into existence. Of course, their own answer that “God must have done it!” is not an answer at all since it merely shifts the problem to that of how god could come into being from nothing.

Stephen Hawking has recently published a book that says that we can indeed understand how the universe came into being without invoking god. The idea itself has been known for sometime but when Hawking says it, it generates a lot of media attention. Cosmologist Sean Carroll explains Hawking’s ideas in a three-minute video.

In short, science has not proved that there is no god (because such proofs are impossible) but has shown is there is no need for god.

The last word (I hope!) on comments and spam

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions in response to my earlier post about how to manage the spam comments menace. There were some very useful ones from people on all sides of the issue.

The problem that I faced was that people sometimes use the comments feature of blogs seemingly purely to insert hyperlinks to their commercial interests in order to gain visibility for some product or service and to drive up their website rankings, and these pointless comments were cluttering up the boards and wasting the time of people who were trying to follow a discussion. [Read more…]

Labor Day musings and some changes in the blog

On this Labor Day I want to wish everyone a great holiday, at least to my American and Canadian readers who are the only ones who celebrate workers on this day, while most of the world does it on May Day (May 1st).

Ironically enough, May Day has its origins in the US as the day that commemorates the Haymarket Riot in 1886 in which police in Chicago fired on workers who were striking for an eight-hour workday. The international worker’s movement adopted a resolution in 1891 to use the anniversary of the Haymarket event to celebrate workers rights. Following another bloody suppression of workers in 1894, again in Chicago, in which federal troops were sent in to break up the Pullman strike and in which over a dozen strikers were killed, the US government sought to try and make peace with US workers by granting a holiday to celebrate workers. But since they did not want to remind people of its history of brutal opposition to worker rights that a May Day holiday might trigger, the US government and Congress in 1894 made the September Labor Day a federal holiday.

So I am taking the day off somewhat but want to flag some minor changes in the blog that will take place immediately.

Long time readers of this blog know that there is a routine here in which I post a single essay of around 1000 words on some topic each weekday at around 9:00 am Eastern time in the US. My goal of writing a daily long form essay serves largely a selfish purpose. Writing about things in some depth sharpens my thinking about them and forces me to look up sources and evidence for my views and not toss off glib, gut-level reactions. It is remarkable how much I learn by doing this and how often that process makes me realize that what I remembered as having happened or said is not correct and forces me to revise my views, as well as serving as a useful reminder of the fallibility of even strong memories. The essay form also keeps me writing regularly and thus improves my writing skills.

But I am finding that my self-imposed rule is too constraining. In the course of keeping up with the news and researching topics there are many interesting, funny, and quirky things that I come across (or are sent to me) or updates to earlier postings that I want to share with readers. I usually collect them and keep them until I can make them part of a later essay, either in the body of the text or, if it does not quite fit, as a post script. The catch is that there are many such interesting items that do not merit a long essay and which do not relate to anything that I am likely to write about at length. I still include some of those things as post scripts but they keep accumulating faster than I can use them and sometimes even go out of date, which seems a waste.

Since I want to preserve the weekday essay feature of the blog, I have decided to supplement it with occasional short postings that will appear randomly as needed.

From the point of view of the readers, the upside is that there will be more content than before (at least I hope that is viewed as an upside). The downside is that it is only the weekday essays that will appear on a regular schedule and the appearance of other items will be unpredictable. I assume that many people have RSS subscriptions that alert them whenever new content appears.