News+and+politics religion philosophy the cynic librarian: Daily HotShots! 14*11*06

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Daily HotShots! 14*11*06

Setting up the Kierkegaard Carnival today, resorting to googling for contributors now. Have found several quite good pieces, not to mention Kierkegaard's MySpace entry (I kid you not).

The news is filled with more jockeying among the technocrats for power. One sign of idealistic--probably utopian--light is the suit brought against Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes.

Per usual, Glenn Greenwald is carrying on a great debate about torture and eternal damnation of prisoners in the US.

Why the Baker commission on Iraq doesn't matter Look at that statement by Panetta--about people "in the know" knowing how bad it is in Iraq for years.

First Things: Social Corruption It's not very often that you find the terms of the so-called "culture war" presented in such sociable terms. The nice thing about this is that it cuts to the nub of the emotional issues that really drive the more high-falutin rhetoric.

For Evangelicals, Supporting Israel Is ‘God’s Foreign Policy’ I find it somewhat ironic--of course, I see everything in terms of irony these days--that the universal message of the early Christian church has apparently come full-circle and includes only the US and Israel.

Netanyahu: It's 1938 and Iran is Germany; Ahmadinejad is preparing another Holocaust This not news. Netanyahu has been finding Nazis under every bush for years. Besides, he hopes to unseat Olmert when the latter's government implodes from charges of corruption. OTOH Israel has been sending mixed signals about its plan to bomb Iran, hoping perhaps to draw the US into the fire. How perfect would that be? Whether Repubs or Dems are in power, there're few politicians that are going to stand up to the Israel Lobby when Israel's "existential" viability is at stake.

Islami Samizdat - Shaykh Daoud Online: An Essay on Redhouse's Pamphlet on the Ottoman Caliphate Interesting essay by a Muslim Tory on what the caliphate could possibly mean in the modern world.

The Top 10 Books on the Crusades
Promising historical reading on a subject that Islamaphobes and jihadists have attempted to twist to their own interests.

The Bush Regime from Elections to Detentions: A Bootstrapped Moral Economy of Carl Schmitt and Human Rights by David Abraham A somewhat forbidding title that hides a pretty clearly argued analysis of the corrupt Bush/neocon morality.

The Gospel According to Bush A very good discussion of some of the theologico-political premises upon which much of Bush's rhetoric rests.

Who Will Pay for Iraq and When? So why hasn't this been exploited by the Dems? While I'm usually averse to making moral arguments based on economics, from my growing appreciation for republican Machialvellism I think someone should start discussing this issue. Or is this a cluster-bomb waiting to blow up in the Dems face? That is, when the notices go out, who's going to have to pay the bill and who'll get tagged with being responsible for raising taxes to pay for it? Perhaps the Dems deserve everything they get, since they seemed to go along with the Iraq charade for so long.

Why Intellectuals Love Defeat (h/t Blackfive) I lve the "you can't handle the truth" nature of much of this branch of the Right's apologists. Not exactly anti-intellectualism this. Obviously, the author here means Leftist intellectuals, not the Right intellectual he quotes.

The dark side of the 'Good War' Explores the truly terroristic methods used by all sides in WWII. Makes you wonder how many years it'll take to learn about the atrocities committed in US name during this Iraq war. Can you say Falluja?

The Name of the Genre: Philosophy Meets Mystery One of my favorite books is Eco's Name of the Rose. I cut some teeth on Dorothy L Sayers' detective novels. Doesn't Chesterton's Father Brown rate some mention? And what about that rather opportunistically titled detective novel, A Philosophical Investigation? Wittgenstein forms the basis for the so-called rationale of the criminal there. We're even supposed to feel sympathy for him since he's killing other serial killers. Oh... spoiler alert.

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