Maybe credit cards don’t encourage spending
November 18, 2009 4 Comments
Yes, Google is making me stupid
I’ve become incredibly adept at multitasking. I like jumping in and out of books that are easily digested in small, thought-provoking chunks. I’m also quite good getting a sense of what a book is about through fragments bouncing around the Internet; a blog post here, a New Yorker article there, and voila! I can talk about Dos Passos’ place in the American literary canon without looking like a complete fool. But I’m losing my ability to sit down and actually read the damn book. And even if I am perfectly capable of masking this deficiency in polite company, I feel like a fraud. So for the next few weeks, I’m going to try to read the damn book.
All of which is to say that this article seems a lot more persuasive now than when I first read it.
November 6, 2009 13 Comments
Our “Terminally Awkward” Future
September 28, 2009 Comments Off
modesty in Afghanistan
My question for Reihan is what aspect of Afghanistan’s history or culture leads him to believe the kind of situation he has envisioned is possible for the country. He writes
building some kind of broadly representative government is an important part of the process, not out of messianic zeal but rather out of a recognition that a government effective enough to police its borders–and you need to do that to stamp out security camps– has to be seen as basically legitimate.
I just don’t see how that jibes with Afghanistan’s history. Romantics aside, monarchy is just another kind of dictatorship, and the periods of greatest stability in Afghanistan’s history have been periods under the rule of monarchs, and those in which Afghanistan was under unapologetic imperial control. Even in those situations, there was tribal violence and areas of lawlessness within the Afghani borders; indeed, disputed zones and areas not firmly under the control of any government in Afghanistan predate, among other things, this country, Christianity, and the English language. Those are the kinds of conditions in which terrorist cells and training camps could hide out easily, or so it seems to me.
Of course, Reihan is right– preventing those kinds of terrorist training camps is our mission, so my pessimism isn’t directed at him or those who are more inclined to his vision for the country. But I do think his association with democratic legitimacy with stable governance is telling. I don’t think that is true. Then again, that’s a much larger debate. In the meantime, Reihan has a point about the modesty of our current goals in Afghanistan and the problems that creates. But I wonder if maybe the alternative is one he likes even less.
February 11, 2009 3 Comments
