Home is a blogwatch

You’ve got to escape

Want to go and wander in the tickertape…

Dappled Things: Suggestions for celebrating Mary’s month.

Healing Iraq: “Not much has been going on in Basrah lately. Traffic and movement has returned to ‘normal’, a few streets where IP stations are located are still blocked. Explosives were found near a primary school which caused some panic among concerned Basrawis, another small bomb was dismantled close to a primary health care clinic which caused me to panic since I work at one. Basrah IP said the bombs were amateurish and wouldn’t cause much damage anyway, so I’m a bit relieved!

“There are signs, graffiti, and banners all over town against returning former Ba’athists to governmental institutions. Other signs strongly condemned the appointment of General Jassim Mohammed over the Fallujah brigade. One sign reads ‘Basrah residents demand a trial for Saddam’s new cowboy in Fallujah’. Another said ‘The return of Ba’athists is a return of Nazism and mass graves.’ Shi’ite clerics have also been making a fuss over it. There is a widespread belief that the US is turning toward Sunnis to take over Iraq again. One doctor at the residence said ‘This is just the first step, wait and see. Gradually, everything will return to what is was like under Saddam.’ Other Shia are comparing the US moves with the situation in 91, when the US allowed Saddam’s regime to suppress the Shi’ite uprising following the Gulf war.”

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EDITED TO ADD: Joe Perez replies to… well, to Jonathan Rauch, really, on homosexuality-as-mild-disability. I think we share so few premises that it would take me time and mental energy I don’t have to write up my own perspective on this stuff… so I won’t. Sorry.

Forager 23 and Motime Like the Present both have cogent comments on the “highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow” distinction. Forager: “I think it’s better to ignore the prejudices of those cultists of modernism who damned the middlebrow in the first place. Their war waged for the highbrow was based on two premises:

“1) The aesthetic experience should and could stand in for the religious experience, that is, it could fill modernity’s spiritual void in the way that religion had in pre-modern times.

“2) Commodifying the aesthetic experience would necessarily destroy it.

“Nowadays, we can’t simply buy into these premises.”

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Motime: “If you say something that people prove they aren’t interested in hearing by staying away from you, you are a ‘highbrow’. If they do happen to flock to your work, you become a ‘middlebrow’. And it’s probably not because you’ve ‘condescended’ to ‘their’ values. It’s the effective expression of personality (not ‘ideas’) that matters. Charles Schulz invokes classical music, Tolstoy, and anything else he happens to be thinking about while he’s stting at the drawing board, and no one thinks of ‘Peanuts’ as a ‘highbrow’ strip. Is it because he mixes in Snoopy’s antics and baseball games? No. It’s because people like it.

“And that’s a good thing. As an artist, you want people to like what you do, don’t you?”

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The Corner: Andrew Stuttaford on Abu Ghraib and Leavenworth: “Something else to consider is the suggestion (implicitly made here by Instapundit) that the abuse of Iraqis by US troops in Abu Ghraib could be a reflection of the way in which sexual humiliation and violence in American jails now seems to be accepted (and sometimes even celebrated).” Much more here.

And: It’s a HayekBlog! All Hayek, all the time.