The New York mosque and the moon

Hendrik Hertzburg has the best commentary so far on the proposed Park51 mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan, fittingly in the New Yorker. I can't add anything to his analysis, only emphasize the irony of Republicans who otherwise loathe New York and constantly complain about how they're enforcing their "liberal values" on "real America" suddenly rediscovering the sacredness of New York ground and decreeing what shall and shall not be built there. You can almost hear the thought: "why is New York hogging all the terrorism?"

I caught In the Shadow of the Moon the other night. It was excellent, a moving look back at the greatest achievement in the history of the human race. (Michael Collins was the de facto star, as he's the funniest of the Apollo astronauts.) On looking back, though, the biggest feeling I get is irritation about our current situation. To me the moon landing period seems like an age of titans compared to now. It was a time of huge problems: racism, civil rights, war, and the moon for starters. But at least people tried—and succeeded, sometimes—to do something about those problems.

Now the problems we are facing, particularly climate change, are arguably worse. But we can't seem to muster up the will to even admit they're problems. When the banking lobby took down the foreclosure bill (cramdown) they not only killed the bill, they got billions in new bailout money. I'll be surprised if we leave Afghanistan while I am alive (we're still in Germany, fer chrissakes). And climate change? Nothing even attempted.

But what gets us up in arms? A mosque in New York, two blocks from Ground Zero. Run by a moderate Muslim, one of Osama bin Laden mortal enemies.

It's a miserably pathetic country.

Comments

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s

Ryan Cooper

Search This Blog