Thanks for the MEMRIs
(We'll all have fun headlining this one.) Via Dan Hartung's Lake Effect blog, from Online Journalism Review: Tim Cavanaugh's Making a MEMRI (subtitled "Site doesn't travel very far to cherry-pick offensive comments"). As Charles Johnson (better known as Little Green Footballs) remarks, it's hard to tell exactly what Cavanaugh thinks about MEMRI. On the one hand:

That MEMRI has a bias against Arab societies can hardly be disputed. [...]

On the other:

But that's the catch. Just how unrepresentative are the comments the Middle East Media Research Institute highlights? Anybody who has spent any time in the Middle East, or even stayed alert to Arab politics, knows that MEMRI doesn't need to travel very far to cherry-pick offensive comments. Indeed, after listening to enough college professors who believe Jews blew up the World Trade Center, priests who say the Holocaust never happened, business executives who tell you McDonalds donates all its Saturday profits to suppressing the Palestinians, burghers who contend that the CIA assassinated Bashir Gemayel, and college students who argue that a rabbinical cabal is suppressing the message of Pat Buchanan, you begin to recognize MEMRI's picks not as extreme outliers but as very common Middle Eastern sentiments, the very air of political discourse in the Arab world.

Notice that now it's "doesn't need to travel very far." So if it's the truth, is it still a bias? Go see for yourself. I did one day last month, listing all of that day's articles under the heading "Read 'em and weep". I'd say that both on that day and since then, there has been an effort to present "reasonable Arab viewpoint" articles as well as the "I love anthrax" ones. The other thing here is that I doubt that anyone will ever agree on a way of fairly representing any country's press by sampling articles from its newspapers and online publications. Yet it's worth doing. So cut MEMRI some slack; better yet, go read it. posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:16:00 PM -- |    

 

Indian and Pakistani reactions
Times of India's Chanand Rajghatta: India read Afghan wicket correctly (which is presumably good):

More than the selection of the Shimla-educated Hamid Karzai as the head of the interim set-up in Kabul, New Delhi has reason to be pleased with the composition of the remaining 30 spots in the arrangement. Eighteen of the posts have gone to the Northern Alliance or the United Front, eleven to the so-called Rome group, and only one to the Pakistan-based Peshawar group. [...]

Although Pakistan has publicly welcomed the new power sharing arrangement, they are said to be fuming privately at being outplayed. The Pakistani bitterness was betrayed by former ISI chief Hamid Gul, who said Karzai would be a puppet of the three Northern Alliance leaders holding the most crucial portfolios.

There has been at least some discussion in Pakistan of the government's miscalculations in Afghanistan; see this article by M.B. Naqvi of the Jang Group Online:

Each Afghan government, otherwise beholden to Pakistan, has disappointed Islamabad and its supporters have had grievances against Pakistan. For a poor under-developed and aid-addict country to nurse imperial dreams can only be unrealistic. Pakistan was not, and is unlikely to be, in a position to develop Afghanistan as a dependency, exploit its resources and draw strategic or any other benefits from that realpolitik vantage point. That was and will remain beyond the capacity of Pakistan. The whole venture should thus be pronounced unwise.

Others by Shafqat Mahmood or Kamran Shafi (via Jim Henley's Unqualified Offerings blog) of the same news outlet are sometimes in the same vein. I hope that some of that same good sense will be applied to resolving the Kashmir dispute without further resorting to state-sponsored terrorism, or escalating to something even worse. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:36:00 PM -- |    

 

The real roots of terror
In The Atlantic Unbound, Jack Beatty writes:

Egypt exports the terrorists the repression produces, but not before its state-dominated media has taught them to blame the misery and backwardness of Arab nations on the U.S. The terrorists then attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We are not a wicked nation but, as long as we subsidize this fated cycle, we are a stupid one. [...]

Instead of taking the war on terror to Iraq, we need to take it to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, terror's source. We need to reach beyond these autocratic regimes to their peoples.

Any one who's read Matt Welch, Ken Layne, Glenn Reynolds, Thomas Friedman, Mark Steyn or any of a number of other writers will be familiar with most of the arguments Beatty makes. But Beatty restates the case well. And read on to see who (dare I say characteristically?) sees only faith based thinking -- Wahhabite, in this case -- where most of us would merely see intolerance and hatemongering. That's a blind spot we can't afford any more. posted by Thomas Nephew at 4:07:00 PM -- |    

 

Walker vs. Spann
Johnny Walker is the Bay Area twit who turned up among the Taliban at the prison in Mazar-e-Sharif. Johnny Spann is the CIA man who died there; who knows, maybe the twit helped out with that. James Lileks reacts to all the biographical detail we're getting about the twit:

1. Johnny Spann, the CIA agent who was killed - where was he from?
2. What book changed his life?
3. What sort of world did he want to bring about?
4. How does his family remember him? What were his personal spiritual beliefs?

I listen to the news 24/7, read the wires constantly. I’m sure there’s just as much info out there on Spann as on Walker. I must have just missed it. Sure, that’s it. I missed it. I’d hate to think that the story of Johnny Taliban was more interesting to news editors than the story of Johnny Spann.

I'd hate that, too, but then I'd realize that's just how they are, they can't even help it: this is practically a "man bites dog" story. Lileks is fun to read, and has a web site that has a half dozen interesting doors to open. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:50:00 AM -- |    

 

The Hamas bombings
So killing a bomber-ringleader needs to be avenged? By what dishonest logic? The fellow's whole rationale was that dying in the fight with Israel was a holy act that would get him and his henchmen into Paradise. So getting rid of him was a win-win proposition: Israel had one less flipping freakoid enemy, said freakoid was out of his misery, and all his nearest and dearest got to believe he was in "Paradise." But of course not: there was never any serious belief by anyone that Allah was involved. And no one blows himself up just to get a settlement torn down, either: the goal is total victory, killing as many Israelis as possible in the process, and driving the rest out.

We've bought into the theater of the Middle East for too long: this reprisal is calibrated to match that one, diplomats phone each other to share the delusion that they matter, media personalities chatter about the cycle of violence, peace prizes are bestowed. And killers keep recruiting simpletons and psychopaths to do their bidding. "Violence begets violence," my foot; no, ineffectively answered violence begets violence. Hamas bombers and their brethren across the Islamist spectrum will cease and desist when they know -- not just worry, know -- that their surviving families won't get spiffy new apartments out of the deal, that it's just a matter of time before their leaders turn up dead, and before they find themselves flying out the side of the apartment they're building their nail-bombs in. posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:07:00 AM -- |    

 

Cloning debate continued here
Last Thursday, Glenn Reynolds wrote:

Some people see this as an abortion. I don't. Or, if it is, then God is the biggest abortionist of all. Huge numbers of "pregnancies" spontaneously abort at this early stage, often without the woman even realizing that she is pregnant. Nor do I feel that a couple of hundred cells constitute a human being. [...]

Another argument is that permitting this will create a slippery slope to true human cloning. I find two problems with this argument. The first is that it assumes that human cloning is bad, which is itself a highly debatable proposition. The second is that I don't think it matters. Human cloning will happen either way: the technology is too close to being there, and there are too many people who want to do it.

Shiloh Bucher replied:

God is also the greatest murderer of nonagenarians, but that doesn't make it moral to kill them for their parts. [...]

I say all this as someone who believes, as Clinton claimed to once, that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. I worry that taking this road offered by therapeutic cloning advocates (TCAs) will make what is, in essence, abortion, tremendously common. And what is being suggested right now are the worst sorts of abortions, in my view, those of pure convenience. [...]

...I don't think that anything done in the name of science or prolonging human life must be moral. I think, for example, that the Chinese use of prisoners for organ transplants is wrong, even if it saves lives. It should not just be up to scientists to decide these things, for they have a vested interest in pushing science to its limits.

I've highlighted the positions I disagree with in red, and the ones I have sympathy for in green. I will now genetically recombine Mr. Reynolds' view of the early stage embryo with Mrs. Bucher's reluctance to engage in unnecessary experimentation into a new, hardier argument -- which neither writer may agree with.

I think that a human clone, if brought to term, might someday be a good thing from that person's point of view, but getting there would entail a morally reprehensible period of trial and error. The first experimental attempts, as they failed, would fail with dire consequences for the baby, with no compelling reason to allow such tragedies to unfold. Even if the first and all subsequent attempts succeeded brilliantly, I'd say that they were experiments with humans, and ethically beyond the pale, just as Nazi, Imperial Japanese, and U.S. (Tuskegee) medical experiments with prisoners or involuntary subjects were beyond the pale. "Success" in an unethical experiment is at best the absence of tragedy. I'm reminded of the claim that scientists at Los Alamos took bets whether the first nuclear explosion would set off an atmospheric chain reaction that would blow up the world.

Incidentally, this seems to me to be similar to the death penalty debate, at least to my version of that debate. In my view, the chief and compelling argument against the death penalty is that with the death penalty, society is all but certain to eventually execute an innocent person, while without it, society is certain to never make that hideous and avoidable mistake. Similarly, a compelling argument against full term human cloning is (I'm guessing now -- but with a different bias than the scientists at Los Alamos) that, over the course of the experimentation necessary to "perfect" the process, there would be human tragedies at worst and late term abortions of convenience "at best" that could have been avoided by simply "never going there."

That said, I agree with Mr. Reynolds that a 100 cell embryo is not human in any important sense, and that sacrificing it, or even more advanced stage embryos up to some (Roe v. Wade?) point for medical purposes is defensible. (Sacrificing such embryos is arguably well short of an abortion for another important reason: no mother's physical well-being need be a factor in the decision.) But I don't at all agree with Mr. Reynolds' surprisingly relaxed assertion that it doesn't matter what we think because human cloning will happen anyway. Here I'm much more in sympathy with Mrs. Bucher's overall attitude: you neither welcome nor resign yourself to something just because it's convenient, advantageous, or inevitable given wealthy clients and/or unscrupulous scientists. Accordingly, I think we should outlaw bringing human clones to term, or even close to it.

I think Mr. Reynolds is right: as it currently stands, "therapeutic cloning" is ethical, and is potentially a boon to humanity. I think Mrs. Bucher is right, too: we are on a slippery slope, and that matters.
=====
edited 6am: 'relaxed'; 11am: Mrs. posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:50:00 PM -- |    

 

This and that
Some thank you's, followups, and worthwhile links:

Steven Den Beste made this thoughtful response to my post " Iraq: What would we be fighting for?" I'll pull this quote:

I'm not convinced that we should attack Iraq, at least yet. I am convinced that ten years of evasion by Iraq about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq's continuing attempts to acquire them has got to come to an end, and it's clear that the only way that's going to happen is via much stronger measures than we have been using until now. Economic sanctions and no-fly zones have not succeeded, but the status quo cannot be permitted to continue. [...]

As I wrote in the comments area, I'm sorting out any additional answer that seems worth posting. I share his irritation about European holier-than-thou attitudes, but that doesn't always mean the Euros are wrong. A more recent post of his indicates he's hoping the apparent victory in Afghanistan will make saber rattling more convincing and ominous to Saddam; that would be fine with me, too. I'm still trying to think through just when I think international or at least Western cooperation is essential to U.S. policy, I think I was not precise enough about that.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden provides this roundup of recent Iraq debate in his "Electrolite" blog. His own recent post about the proposed sale of advanced surface-to-surface missiles to Egypt is also very good.

Mr. Nielsen Hayden is a science fiction editor, among other things, and I've been enjoying a copy of his "Starlight 3" anthology. The first story, "Hell is the absence of God," by Ted Chiang, was great, as were many others. Chiang's story works out the injustices and absurdities of religious devotion and what it could mean to be "touched by an angel" in a dry, funny, gently serious way. It reminded me, for some reason, of a novel called "First Contract," by Greg Costikyan (and also published by Tor Books), in which Earth fights aliens in the only way possible: with entrepreneurism. Both stories sparkle with the fun the authors had writing them, and both have a kind of "parable" or "thought experiment" effect that I like to find in speculative fiction. (Book purchases via these links generate commissions in association with Amazon.com, in case that bothers you.)

This is also by way of saying thank you to Mr. Nielsen Hayden for a couple of nice mentions, one of which (about "Kunduz shopkeeper") brought about a veritable storm of hits on 11/29-11/30 after he mentioned it to Cory Doctorow's very enjoyable techie/software/wired world-oriented blog BoingBoing.Net ("A directory of wonderful things"). Honored to a part of that, however small. Thank you all for checking by, hope to see you again -- although traffic is back to normal. I eagerly looked for new comments as the cyberstorm broke, but found none. Oh well. The point of these "countermentions," in addition to just saying "thank you," is that I like a good discussion. Please feel free to leave notes via the "comment" link or by e-mail.

By contrast, I'd have to say that the "Link and Think" AIDS effort resulted in no discernible traffic at all. That is, my Bravenet log showed no http://www.linkandthink.org/directory/participantsNR.shtml (this blog's spot in the directory) "referrers" to my site, and that seemed to be the only way anyone would have known I tried to pipe up about the issue. I suggested they consider implementing a "ring" of participants next time, and/or selecting a "best of Link and Think." I'd add that a catalogue and/or searchable index of entries might be a good idea. While many people confined themselves to just posting the ribbon button, and some seem to have forgot about the activity altogether, I found some good contributions as I looked around at random: Pith and Vinegar, HIV in Rural America, Blah Blah Blog (if you've got a teenage/college daughter, save this one; relax, she's not HIV+ -- just lucky), Backwash.com ("Pseudo-Goth Library Chick"). - edited 12/3 (misc), 12/4 (name corrections)

posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:31:00 PM -- |