1. Turkey trots toward another uncomfortable showdown with itself. Like Pakistan but with an army you can trust to wrest control away from Islamists.
2. At Eurozine there is a long piece to be filed in the Weird Brief on Contemporary Pantheism, an introductory post-it note for which I've scribbled at The American Scene.
3. Recently in a nice back and forth with John I made some remarks about violent interrogation on, near, off, and far, far away from the battlefield; read Nicola Feat. Nietzsche for an interesting contrapunto:
“In combat you question your mortality,” he told me. “In these prisons you question your morality.”
That's Ben Allbright talking. My point stands I think that the problem is the zone between the one in which one's mortality is, or has just been, on the line and the one in which merely one's morality is.
4. From FP, another reason why Kosovo won't start a domino effect of fragmentary unworthies jockeying for sovereign recognition: the deck's stacked heavily against non-favorites of major powers, and only Taiwan bothers to keep trying.
5. At Spiked, Jennie Bristow appears to have been hijacking the wireless connection leading to my brain:
What is generally agreed, however, is that the privileging of personal ‘identity’ as a route to finding meaning in life is a fraught process, in which a constant state of anxiety becomes the norm: a process which individuals are never expected to resolve, only cope with.
6. Chateaubriand with an aristocratic lesson for us all:
The future -- The difficulty of comprehending it
From that Eurozone piece:
"To the shallow observer, Pentecostalism may appear to be a branch tailored for the rich and successful. It is, true enough, the faith to which George W. Bush and many of his counterparts adhere. "
If that's "true enough," then I'd hate to see "not true."
Posted by: Matt Frost | April 07, 2008 at 06:08 AM