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Some amateurish thoughts on John Milbank
I don’t claim to understand everything in this John Milbank essay that Russell discussed yesterday (I will assume, as a matter of charity, that it’s my fault and not Milbank’s), but I do have a couple of bones to pick with it. Milbank seems to be contrasting a strawman version of “liberalism” (by which I…
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I dunno, the Pax Americana has been a little short on the pax as of late
The military is having a tough time meeting recruiting goals I suppose because fewer people want to go get shot at in a war that a majority of Americans now say has not made us safer. What to do? Well, the sensible solution, as offered in this piece by Christopher Preble, would be to scale…
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"A weird figure of the dark"
Batman Begins has been getting some glowing reviews. Here’s one from The Onion’s AV Club.
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Restoring my anti-Bush credibility
Marcus thinks I was too easy on the Bush administration here. My point, though, was the quite narrow one that there was some justification for beleiving that Saddam posessed some WMD, and that the administration seems to have sincerely beleived he did. I don’t like to speculate about motives since I don’t have access to…
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Patriots and PATRIOTs
I’m happy to see that the House has voted to strip the PATRIOT (sic!) Act of the provisions which permit the Feds to look at library book and bookstore sale records. Even in the unlikely event that it makes it past the Senate and the President, there are other provisions dealing with search warrants and…
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The big wide world
The ever-interesting Eugene McCarraher reviews Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics in Books & Culture. (via Kevin Jones) The Amish as technological innovators! (via Gutless Pacifist) Russell Arben Fox (who compensates for the infrequency of his posts with sheer meaty substance) comments on John Milbank’s theological politics. (Have I mentioned that reading Milbank makes my head hurt?)…
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The fix was in?
Good, balanced article from Fred Kaplan at Slate on the now-infamous “Downing Street Memo” and its significance: The “killer quote” in the original Sunday Times story is this passage from the July 23 ministers’ meeting: C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen…
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Michael Jackson, "recovered memories" and the importance of juries
I have no opinion on the Michael Jackson case, not having followed it closely enough. But I thought this was a good article by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. Also of note from Couterpunch: House Republicans vs. Bush on the war.
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Sophists, economists and calculators
The NYT has an article on a group of fresh-faced young interns at the conservative Heritage Foundation – a think-tank in D.C. for those blissfully ignorant of the world of policy wonkery. While there is something inherently disturbing about conservative youths, this bit in particular struck me as summing up a lot of what’s wrong…
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Right-wing Catholic Workers of the world unite!
Michael Brendan Dougherty posted a link to this great article by Bill Kauffman that I remember reading a couple of years ago, titled, improbably, “Dorothy Day and the American Right.” I’m a big fan of Kauffman’s writing; he’s a kind of humanistic, small-l libertarian – more H.D. Thoreau than Ayn Rand. His books America First…
