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Andrew Sullivan flags a propaganda video made by the Assad regime that uses Darth Vader’s theme as background music. That would actually be a compliment to Assad; at least Darth was competent and cool-looking. The movie joke I have heard over and over about Bashar Assad in the Middle East is both more accurate and [...]
Archive for the ‘Middle East Politics’ Category
December 2nd, 2011
Social psychologists have documented an intriguing phenomenon dubbed “outgroup homogeneity”. It is the tendency to assume that groups to which you do not belong are less diverse than they are (in contrast, we overestimate diversity within groups of which we are a part). I have described before how this cognitive error produced complete misunderstandings of [...]
June 12th, 2011
Category: Middle East Politics
Al-Jazeera reports that the Syrian security forces are “cracking,” with some soldiers refusing to fire on protesters.
May 22nd, 2011
Category: Israel, Middle East Politics
Every year I become more alarmed about Israel’s future, not least because of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s intransigent response to a changing world
May 6th, 2011
Category: Middle East Politics
Belgravia Dispatch features Gregory Djerejian’s speculations about whether Bashar Assad will escalate his crackdown efforts as well as some not-for-the-squeamish videos of the violence in the streets. I find the violence horrifying, but at the same time am repeatedly, pleasantly surprised that the Syrian people have at last moved away from blaming everyone in the [...]
April 16th, 2011
The same edition of The Economist in which Keith found the fascinating article about judges’ lunches (reminds me of the classic Brecht line, in Blitzstein’s translation, “first feed the face, and then talk right and wrong“) has a truly heartbreaking story from the West Bank. Just read it. [Update 17/IV: Here's the original. In this [...]
March 21st, 2011
Even if Libya turns into a quagmire, here are three reasons why a Qaddafist insurgency would pale in comparison to Iraq.
February 11th, 2011
Mark’s cold shower is entirely correct. But I think he may be insufficiently pessimistic. The pieces haven’t been all thrown up in the air to fall back randomly; the system has a lot of structure and the dice are heavily loaded in favor of the army, which is the only institution to come out of [...]
