A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

War & Peace

  • Forever war

    Michael Brendan Dougherty has a smart article in the new issue of The American Conservative about the post-election “whither conservatism” talk that has been roiling the Right. The one thing that doesn’t seem to be receiving much of the ballyhooed conservative re-thinking, Dougherty points out, is the Iraq war, and foreign policy more generally. Read more

  • The new Cold War?

    Robert Scheer worries that the old Cold War hawks advising Obama will lead to a ratcheting up of tensions with Russia. Read more

  • Violence and hermeneutics

    Marvin reflects on the place of texts in the Bible that seem to implicate God in violence, with a little help from St. Augustine. I’m not sure God insists that we be pacifists; I’m even less sure that God is a pacifist (as Marvin acknowledges and Miroslav Volf argues). But there are still passages in Read more

  • Why I won’t vote third party

    Looks like Ron Paul, whom some of his supporters hoped would make a third-party run for president, is urging people who are sick of war, assaults on civil liberties, and, er, the Fed to vote for a third party–any third party! I appreciate the arguments that the two major parties and their candidates are either Read more

  • On the radio: Greenwald and Yglesias

    Very interesting discussion between Salon’s Glenn Greenwald and uber-blogger Matt Yglesias on the press’s coverage of the campaign. But one of the most important points comes out toward the end where Greenwald and Yglesias both agree that the Obama campaign has, disappointingly, shifted gears since the primary, where Obama seemed to welcome a debate with Read more

  • Bacevich on “Democracy Now!”

    Starts at about 33 minutes into this stream (thanks, Elliot!). To the extent that I still think of myself as a conservative, it’s in the Bacevich-Reinhold Niebuhr mold. Bacevich gets at what I take to be the heart of this conservatism in the interview: it’s the recognition that world exists prior to us and doesn’t Read more

  • The “empire of consumption” and Obamanomics

    John Wiener interviews Andrew Bacevich on our “empire of consumption” and the limits of Obama: But he’s not one of those radicals who argue there is no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. “I call myself an Obama-con, Bacevich says, “a conservative who will vote for Obama – because of the Iraq war. He Read more

  • Consumerism, simplicity, and sin

    If Andrew Bacevich is right that our consumptive habits are the cause, not only of resource depletion and environmental degradation, but of our far-flung military adventurism, then the unpleasant conclusion seems to be that we need to start consuming less. Here’s an article (via Book Forum) about, among other things, a professor in Western Pennsylvania Read more

  • Bacevich on Moyers

    Via Andrew Sullivan, here’s a great interview on Bill Moyers’ Journal with Andrew Bacevich on our foreign policy and what is, in his view, its underlying cause: our demand for an undending, fossil-fuel-dependent supply of consumer goods and our inability to practice self-restraint. Bacevich’s new book, The Limits of Power, looks like a worthy sequel Read more

  • “Creeping militarization”

    Tom Engelhardt offers some evidence. Read more