Diarist
"Stay out of Syria!” screams the cover of The New York Review of Books. It would have been graphically cumbersome, I guess, or bad for newsstand sales, to have printed it this way: “Ignore the Murder of a Hundred Thousand People and the Massacre of Children and the Use of Chemical Weapons and the Bombing of a Civilian Population by Its Government and Millions of Displaced Persons Outside Syria and Millions of Displaced Persons Inside Syria and the Destabilization of Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan and the Aggression of Hezbollah and the Ascendancy of Iran!”
A reporter who visited the White House last week brought back the news that the criticism of President Obama’s immobility about the Syrian disaster has “begun to sting.” Good. Something got through.
Moving on is one of the quintessential expressions of the American spirit, and of the American shallowness.
Obama Crosses His Own Red Line
The president turns a blind eye to Syria's use of chemical weapons
Obama has a problem. On August 20, 2012, he declared that the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian dictator is his “red line.” It appears that in March a chemical weapon was used in Khan al-Asal in the province of Aleppo. The game is on.
Against the messianic conception of data—Big Data.
It has been two years since fifteen teenagers in the town of Dara’a scrawled “the people want the regime to fall” on the wall of a school. Two years. The Obama administration may as well not have existed.
A Darwinist Mob Goes After a Serious Philosopher
When Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos recently appeared, Steven Pinker took to Twitter and haughtily ruled that it was “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.” Fuck him, he explained.
The fence along Israel's border with Syria will help to protect Israel. What could go wrong with that?
Barack Obama's foreign policy: "light footprint," lightweight thinking.