L and X don't care
Christopher Hitchens discusses Thomas Paine, revolution, and anti-deism.#
I have a pedagogic demonstration of this, which I sometimes offer; I'll offer it now. Look at the oldest international dispute that faces us now--one we inherited, actually, from the League of Nations, not just from the UN. This dispute comes from the League of Nations mandate in Palestine and is the oldest issue on the international agenda. It is of course the Israeli-Palestine question. I once heard, in a hall not far from here, Abba Eban, some of you will remember him, rather polished British/South African Israeli with a partly British, partly South African accent, who used to be called Captain Aubrey Eban, in the old days, Israel's ambassador to the UN, Israel's foreign minister, very suave spokesman for the Zionist cause.
He opened a speech by saying, "Look at the Israel-Palestine dispute," he said (I can't quite do his plummy voice), "and it'll strike you that the first thing to notice about it is the ease of its solution." Now, not many speeches on this question begin that way, but I thought he put it very well. He said, "Everybody knows what the problem is. There are two peoples of approximately equal size with approximately equally valid claims to one land. Well, that's easy to solve. You divide the land between them. Give them an equal share and you hope that, over time, they'll grow a bit close together, but you can't have them living one on top of the other or....well." You might talk common sense about a crisis, but why can it not be effected? Why can't the obvious solution be implemented? That's easy. The godly forbid it to happen.
Only a minority of the godly is required first to say, "Excuse me, God gave us this land. There's nothing to talk about." General [Ariel] Sharon actually said that to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee not long ago and some senators sent their staffers to look it up, said, "Is that true, what he just said?" I'm not--I do not jest.
It only takes a few of them to say—"And furthermore, we're going to settle that land, as if God gave it to us." Well, that's also easy, because there will be no shortage of imams to say, "Good point, but it was actually God who gave it to us, sorry. I mean, you're quite right, except you've got the wrong people. This is all Muslim land. Anyone else on it is an interloper, an infidel and must go, at best. Killed, preferably."
Alexander Payne relates the cutest story ever.#
It had to belong to the girl with dark hair by the counter. I saw her when I got my coffee. Took note, lovely. Her. Her?
There is no music on my PowerBook. I offloaded my library to a drive that is to remain perpetually hooked up to my new Mac mini, serving away at home. Nonetheless, I shared my empty library out under the name maria i sweat your music collection <3.
I waited. I listened to selections from her library: Low, Manual. And then the sound skipped. I flipped to iTunes. Her library title had changed: try_the_new_dalek.
A conversation began, conducted solely by library title, and it continued for the next couple of hours.
Alex Tabarrok links to Brad DeLong on the costs of the Civil War.#