Posts Tagged: Obama

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16
Nov 09

Chinese Democracy

Now with 100% less GnR.

Barrack Obama’s town hall meeting with Chinese students doesn’t seem to have generated any great volume of blogging yet, at least not that I can find as I write. That’s kind of a shame: it would be nice to keep the Chinese internet censors busy.

The President was briefly given the opportunity to address Chinese internet policy, which he politely and circumspectly opposed. Apparently his comments continued to be readable in China for several hours before authorities papered them over. That’s nice, but it’s not all that much.

When I was in China briefly over the summer, I made a few just-for-fun attempts to get a blog post censored from there, writing for another site. No luck. While in Xinjiang, which was and is still in post-riot hyper-security mode, I literally couldn’t get online at all. They’d shut off the internet tap to the entire province (which is probably something like the size of Texas). Later, while in central and southern China, I could get online and check email (hell, I read a NYTimes story on net Chinese censorship ), but couldn’t log into wordpress.com.

So, in the end, I couldn’t get a post blocked because I couldn’t post at all. That’s a pretty thick firewall they’ve got around their political establishment. It’s not clear to me how or why they’d take it down.

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13
Oct 09

What the Generals are Reading

George Packer has the skinny on what pages Obama and his offier corps are turning at the late stages of two wars. Packer adds a caveat:

It’s understandable that Vietnam books—and not books on the War of the Roses—should be circulating through the Obama Administration. But Vietnam invites selective and tendentious reading, which leads to battles of reading lists, which is apparently what’s going on right now between the White House and the Pentagon. There’s a reason why certain White House advisers gravitated toward Goldstein, while certain officers are hung up on Sorley. It might be better for these bookish public servants to pore over histories of World War I, or Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian War.” Those conflicts are remote and yet suggestive enough that they are more likely to serve as indirect but useful guides to thought and action than to be treated as blueprints. The rule for Administration readers should be: no books that you already know will confirm the views you already hold. If that’s asking too much, at least the advisers and officers should be required to exchange volumes, and read what their policy opponents are reading, before the book group meets and decides the fate of the world.

Perhaps they might take turns bringing baked goods as well.

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10
Oct 09

Peace prize

Well you can’t throw a rock without hitting an opinion on this the last two days. Here, here, and here are Andrew Sullivan’s helpful surveys of opinion on the subject. His own reaction–not too shabby–is here.

From what I can tell, opinion is divided as follows: the right has rolled out a predictable critique and the left feels that the Nobel committee invited it. Plenty, to be clear, think this was deserved. It’s hard to find many who think this was a great idea. It’ll be fascinating to know someday how yesterday morning played out in the Whitehouse.

A few past laureates are more positive:

Mohamed Elbaradei, the director-general of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency, who received the prize in 2005, said in a statement that he was “absolutely delighted.”

“I cannot think of anyone today more deserving of this honor,” he said. “In less than a year in office, he has transformed the way we look at ourselves and the world we live in and rekindled hope for a world at peace with itself.”

Along a similar vein, another laureate, President Shimon Peres of Israel, sent a letter to President Obama on Friday morning, saying: “Very few leaders if at all were able to change the mood of the entire world in such a short while with such a profound impact. You provided the entire humanity with fresh hope, with intellectual determination, and a feeling that there is a lord in heaven and believers on earth.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time the Nobel committee has displayed a slightly tin ear. Here’s a Newsweek review of past controversial awardees. Really, does this make less sense than giving the prize to Henry Kissinger?

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9
Oct 09

“Nobel Prize jumps the shark”

So read a million blog post titles right now. Or so I assume. Anyone as amazed as I am by the Nobel committee (and I take that to be anyone), might refer to the following proposed headline Fox News on Metafilter:

SOCIALIST NORWAY GIVES PRIZE TO SOCIALIST KENYAN

And, you know, Fox would have a grain of truth for once. It’s that and, you know, the whole nuclear disarmament thing. Preventing the destruction of humanity in a firy infurno probably counts too.

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