Comic-con 08: This Is What Ender's Game Will Look Like From Now On is io9's report on the Ender's Game comic, coming from Marvel in October. Apparently it will be different than the book.

Really interesting quote From Lawrence Dennis

"Any charter of liberties becomes necessarily an absurdity after a few years, for no plan of public order and means to its realization can long, be appropriate to changing conditions."

People are talking again about what Obama said (in addition to the need to deal resolutely and decisively with terrorists) about the roots of the 9/11 attacks

The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.

Fair enough.

But is that consistent with his understanding of poverty he expressed in Dreams of My Father (see below)?

There he claimed poverty in inner city Chicago is the worst, because of the lack of "discernible order" in the life of the poor (order provided by tradition and networks of middlemen and bribe takers). Wouldn't the kind of traditional societies like those of the Arab world fit the model of those that provide "discernible order"? But the terrorists didn't and haven't come from Chicago, they came from a place where there was tradition.

I continue to be concerned with the statist impulse. The statist assumes he knows enough about social order to manipulate it. But nobody knows enough to do what he think will actually come to pass. Thus the governing impulse that humbly says we can't know the "roots" or "climate" that produces something (I'm becoming more leery of the climate metaphor) and instead we deal with the matters at hand is bound to be more effective and in tune with reality, avoiding the inevitable "unintended consequences"

Post Apocalypse. TIME writes on the phenomenon of mean blog commenters.

Thoughts?

I continue to be fascinated by the anonymous writer for the Asia Times "Spengler". Of interest to me is a recent article where he draws out the influence of the anthropological background of Obama's mother on Obama

Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with primitive peoples. He holds his own view in reserve and emphatically draws out the feelings of others; that is how friends and colleagues describe his modus operandi since his days at the Harvard Law Review, through his years as a community activist in Chicago, and in national politics. Anthropologists, though, proceed from resentment against the devouring culture of America and sympathy with the endangered cultures of the primitive world. Obama inverts the anthropological model: he applies the tools of cultural manipulation out of resentment against America. The probable next president of the United States is a mother's revenge against the America she despised.

The anthropologist Obama is on display in a quotation from Dreams of my Father that Spengler references here

As we walked back to the car, we passed a small clothing store full of cheap dresses and brightly colored sweaters, two aging white mannequins now painted black in the window. The store was poorly lit, but toward the back I could make out the figure of a young Korean woman sewing by hand as a child slept beside her.

The scene took me back to my childhood, back to the markets of Indonesia: the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betel nut and swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms ... I saw those Djakarta markets for what they were: fragile, precious things. The people who sold their goods there might have been poor, poorer even than folks out in Altgeld [the Chicago housing project where Obama engaged in community organizing]. They hauled fifty pounds of firewood on their backs every day, they ate little, they died young. And yet for all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust. It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself.

That's quite revealing. As Spengler comments

The coherence of traditional society imposes a structure on life, a structure so rigid that such societies cannot adapt to change and must crumble before encroaching empire. In return for the sanctity of individual rights, Americans are freed from the constraints of traditional society and made responsible for their own actions. For an American presidential candidate to refer to traditional society as the model for the solution to American problems has no precedent. It is one thing to denounce American errors while upholding American principles. Never before has America considered electing a president who prefers the alternative, and that might just be the most dangerous thing to happen to the United States since its Civil War.

Back in the original article, though, American's "freedom from constraints" have a downside

Americans have no institutionalized culture to fall back on. Their national religion has consisted of waves of enthusiasm - "Great Awakenings" – every second generation or so, followed by an interim of apathy. In times of stress they have a baleful susceptibility to hucksters and conmen.