Christmas Day Quote

After reading Dickens' A Christmas Carol, I thought this quote especially relevant in regards to religious extremism in the world today, no matter what the faith:

“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”
-A Christmas Carolby Charles Dickens

The Anbar Experience: A New Solution or Just Another Problem?

While the decision of many Sunni militias (including former Baathists and religious extremists) to join with the Coalition forces in combating Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia (AQM) in places like Anbar province has been hailed as an aspect of success for the surge of U.S. troops and military actions in the Iraq, a recent article in the NY Times presents a more in-depth look at the implications of this new "Sunni Awakening" for Iraq at large, specifically as concerns the country's biggest obstacle: Sunni-Shia violence:

Though the Americans obtain biometric data on every Awakening group member to try to screen out known insurgents, the government and many Shiite citizens say they fear that the movement has spread so quickly that it is impossible to keep track of who has signed up for it. And while government officials are somewhat willing to accept the tribal character of the Awakening groups in Anbar Province, they are leery of the new ones in and around Baghdad, which have more Baathists from the era of Saddam Hussein in their leadership and are active in more mixed neighborhoods.

“Many people believe this will end with tens of thousands of armed people, primarily Sunnis, and this will excite the Shiite militias to grow and in the end it will grow into a civil war,” said Safa Hussein, the deputy national security adviser and a point man on the Awakening program for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

...

While Mr. Mashadani is ready to look past his former enmity to work with the Americans, he draws the line at any partnership with the central government. He characterizes Shiite officials as pawns of Iran and Shiite death squads, a common view among Sunni Arabs in both Baghdad and Anbar.

“We want to work for the Americans, not the government,” he said. “It is as clear as the sun: the Iranians have dominated the ministries, the whole government. These guys are a bunch of conspirators who belong to Iran.”

So the Sunni-Shia rift in Iraq still seems no closer to being resolved, and not one presidential candidate seems to have put enough thought into facilitating any type of viable peace or balance of power between these two groups. All we hear is either Republicans talking about defeating the omnipresent, ill-defined "terrorists" or Democrats talking about withdrawal, without mentioning what effect this process would have, positively or negatively (because arguments have been made either way), in regards to Shia-Sunni violence.

Paul Krugman is a dick

There was a time when I read NY Times columnist Paul Krugman's op-eds and gave them a chance. He seemed like an intelligent man and I thought he may have some insightful things to say.

But the more I've read Krugman over the past couple of years, the more I've realized how little his craptastic columns are worth. What repulses me most about the man is that he personifies everything that's wrong with blind partisanship, whether it's to a political party or ideology. For Krugman, there is an absolute truth and he knows it. And anyone who departs from this ideoligical (leftist) or party (Democrat) line is to condemned as a heretic.

This dogmatic position angers me even more as someone who politically leans left of center. I may not always agree with religious conservatives, social conservatives, libertarians, or even leftists like marxists, socialists, or even fellow liberals. But I do not, however, believe that I hold the absolute truth to all things social, economic or political. And I believe even less that anyone who disagrees with me on an issue is always a charlatan or an evil, disingenious bastard. In some cases I may feel that is the case. But most of the time I do not. For instance, I do not agree with the libertarian belief that the income tax should be abolished and replaced with a national sales tax because I think this would lead to a more regressive, less egalitarian tax structure. Yet I do not believe that most of the people who do support this tax structure are doing so because they want to make the rich even richer and stick it to poor people. Most of these individuals seem to believe that this tax structure would lead to greater individual freedom and economic growth for everyone. They believe it. I don't. And I will continue to oppose this idea, but not on the grounds that my opponents are evil.

But for Krugman, anyone who disagrees with him never seems to fall into the category of simply mistaken or wrong about their position. Rather, Krugamn almost always implies or outright charges that his opponents should know better, that those supporting different beliefs are evil and want to harm the vast majority of people and further empower themselves.

No where has the sick structure of Krugman's attacks been clearer than on presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama. For Krugman, Obama is a heretic for even considering "moderate" positions or bipartisan efforts. The biggest pet peeves for Krugman are Obama's positions and statements on healthcare and social security as we can see from a recent interview with TPM:

Yet on health care Obama is behaving as kind of, "Let's make a deal." The idea that he would be talking even in the primary campaign about the big table is suggesting that he is not all that committed to taking on special interests.

On the big problems there's a fundamental, deep-seated difference between the parties. I've always just felt that his tone was one suggesting that his inclination is to believe that we can somehow resolve these thing through a kind of outbreak of good feeling.

...

When Obama used the word "crisis" about Social Security it gave me a little bit of a sense of, "Hmmm -- I'm a little worried that my initial concerns were more right than I knew."

To have Obama sort of sounding like the Washington Post editorial page really said among other things that he just hasn't been listening to progressives, for whom the fight against Bush's Social Security scare tactics was really a defining moment. Among the Dems he seems to be the least attuned to what progressives think.

It's a tone thing. I find it a little bit worrisome if we have a candidate who basically starts compromising before the struggle has even begun.

Now I wouldn't be as ticked off if Krugman simply said that he believes Obama's plans on health care and social security to be wrong. Maybe they are wrong. But Krugman goes even further: apparently, it isn't that Obama is simply wrong--in fact he knows he's taking the wrong position. For Krugman, moderates, centrists and independent thinkers are fictitious beings. The world is simply divided into left and right, liberal and conservative, good and evil. And any position that does not conform to Krugman's worldview is on the "wrong side," the evil conservative side. So when Obama takes a position on healthcare that does not include government mandates and does include more market incentives, it isn't just that his plan wouldn't work (from a more leftist, big govenrment perspective); even more than the plan's supposed inefficacy, Krugman shouts, is the "fact" that Obama is taking "conservative" positions in a cowardly act of surrender to the "evil" Republican side.

None of us, no matter what our political persuasion or party, has a hold on absolute truth. We all have our well-reasoned (and for others, I should mention, not-so-well-reasoned) positions about the world and specific social, economic and political issues. And we should fight and argue in support of them. But we should not, however, be so attached to our worldview that we do not remain open to new ideas and new facts and arguments that may further enrich or evolve our own perspective. We should not be so opposed to other perspectives that we are not willing to compromise for the good of society on certain things. Our entire government system was based on the ideas of ideological balance and compromise, on the idea that no one person or party has a claim to absolute truth or natural law. Moderation is not always the weapon of the weak (although in some cases, of course, moderation may be the wrong way to go).

What we need in the world now, Mr. Krugman, is not more partisanship and blind ideology but more independent thought and open, intelligent discussion.