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The Long View

The Long View 2004-04-14: Failed Campaign

Actually, al-Mahdi is like Jesus in Christian eschatology, in that he is the one who will reorder the world in complete justice. Failed Campaign The events on the ground in Iraq are progressing as well as can be expected for that difficult enterprise. The long-expected Islamist attempts to foment civil

The Long View: The Coming World Civilization

The most interesting idea to come out of this book by William Ernest Hocking is the 'unlosables', those aspects of a culture that persist even when the society that created them falls into decay. It the unlosables that we speak of when we refer to the Greek or

The Long View 2004-04-09: Good Friday

The best thing I can say about this post from twelve years ago is that almost nothing has changed in that time. Good Friday Let us begin with the Stations of the Cross. For our meditations, we will use the lyrics to Fires (Which Burned Brightly), by the old art-rock

The Long View 2004-04-05: Mullah John Belushi

I don't know enough about Muqtada al-Sadr to have a real opinion, other than to say he is still influential twelve years later. I do know that Shia clerics like al-Sadr often study Aristotle and Plato, and that gives us something in common. I also picked the first

The Long View 2004-04-02: Innoculation

The process, predicted by Glenn Reynolds in National Interest in 1994, of altering the nature of journalism is now quite advanced. The prevalence of both still and motion cameras in nearly everyone's hands has certainly altered content production, since nearly every news item is now accompanied by cellphone

The Long View: TechGnosis

I kind of miss the nineties cyberspace speculations like the book John reviews here. The Internet turned out to be far more tawdry and commercial than anyone thought twenty years ago. TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information by Erik Davis Harmony Books, 1998 $25.00, 368

The Long View 2004-03-29: Unexpected Storms

Richard Clarke comes in again for more aspersions from John. I'm not Clarke deserved this, but I suppose it doesn't matter much now, even though it would seem that Clarke was probably more in the right. Of vastly more interest [to me] is John's