A Second Hand Conjecture

Brief except of a talk at the 92nd Street Y between Salman Rushdie and Irshad Manji, discussing the possibility of reform against extremism in the Islamic faith. Rushdie draws a fine parallel with the experience of the Western left during the Cold War. Specifically, its attempt to create a distinction between their non-existent idealized socialism, and the actuality of a destitute, totalitarian nightmarescape on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

At issue is the extent to which the Western left sought to resist criticism of existing socialism in the name of defending it as an ideal. Commendably, Rushdie has little faith in this project reapplied to Islam, much less as a promise to actualize reform.

No Comments »

A depressingly confused analogy from Medvedev on US aid to Georgia:

“I wonder how they would like it if we sent humanitarian assistance using our navy to countries of the Caribbean that have suffered from the recent hurricanes.”
(AFP)

We’d welcome that. It’s distressing that the Russian government hears only our resistance, without our reasons for it. And here again, there is a certain naiveté to Medvedev that always makes one think it might someday be possible to penetrate the reality distortion field of Putinism that imprisons his imagination.

(more…)

1 Comment »

(photo: companyink)

After writing about the Ronpaulist fear mongering of Jordan Page, and then reading Lance’s splendid post on the latest contheorist pandering of Glenn Greenwald, a common insight has reoccurred to me: the absurd amount of cognitive dissonance conditional to political paranoia.

This is something Christopher Hitchens explored quite adeptly last year at the “Four Horsemen” chat with his three fellow atheist luminaries, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris (video, skip to 8:17). In a response to a point by Dennett, Hitchens argues that the stress of cognitive dissonance is the inevitable state deriving from belief in political unreality, and furthermore, that this condition exists and persists on purely survival grounds (seems true in miniature too).

I’d add that it’s the compartmentalism that political paranoia necessitates in an open society that is the most conspicuous betrayal of its essential cynicism. Something especially apparent when you run into it face to face.
(more…)

No Comments »