Jeff Sharlet over at The Revealer has been doing a series (1, 2, 3)of comments on LGF (if you know, you know why I’m not linking. If you don’t know, you’re a better person for it.) Jeff’s latest post really does highlight why this is a major story, and it needs to get picked up after the election cycle.
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Who to blame (redux)
So it looks like Professor Osgood is helping me make up my mind about who to blame regarding Abu Ghraib. Here is a graf from what he wrote in today ‘s Washington Post: Military sociology has at its core two powerful insights. First, military organizations reflect in many ways the societies from which they emerge. If a society condones brutality and lewdness, you will find soldiers beating prisoners and copulating with one another while their comrades take souvenir snapshots. If a society has no norm of chief executives accepting responsibility for their corporations’ moral and financial failures, do not expect…
Who said that?
“America’s in trouble today not because her people have failed but because her leaders have failed. And what America wants are leaders to match the greatness of her people… “And this is their answer, and this is my answer to that question: When the strongest nation in the world can be tied up for four years in a war in Vietnam with no end in sight, when the richest nation in the world can’t manage its own economy, when the nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is plagued by unprecedented lawlessness, when a nation that has…
The Mahdi
Father Jake had a question regarding the Mahdi and the use of the name “Mahdi Army” by Muqtada as-Sadr. He’s gone out and done a fair amount of research, and I wanted to add my two cents. From a theological perspective, the idea of the Mahdi is incredibly ill-defined, because the idea of the end days are ill-defined in the Qur’an. While we have a sense that the mountains will crumble, stars will fall from the sky and the sky itself will tear, there is no equivalent to the Book of Revelations in the Qur’an. (For a wonderful discussion of…