Month: June 2012

A host of lessons on the web, with room for admiration

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit — Farrall and McCants, debate and discourse]
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There’s a whole lot to be learned about jihad, counter-terrorism, scholarship, civil discourse, online discourse, and social media, and I mean each and every one of those, in a debate that took place recently, primarily between Leah Farrall and Will McCants.

Indeed, Leah still has a final comment to make — and when she makes it, that may be just the end of round one, if I may borrow a metaphor from a tweet I’ll quote later.
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Briefly, the biographies of the two main agonists (they can’t both be protagonists, now, can they? I believe agonist is the right word):

Dr. Leah Farrall (left, above) is a Research Associate at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre (USSC). She was formerly a senior Counter Terrorism Intelligence Analyst with the Australian Federal Police (AFP), and the AFP’s al Qaeda subject matter specialist. She was also senior Intelligence Analyst in the AFP’s Jakarta Regional Cooperation Team (JRCT) in Indonesia and at the AFP’s Forward Operating Post in response to the second Bali bombings. Leah has provided national & international counter terrorism training & curriculum development. She recently changed the name of her respected blog. Her work has been published in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.

Dr. William McCants, (right) is a research analyst at the Center for Strategic Studies at CNA, and adjunct faculty at Johns Hopkins University. He has served as Senior Adviser for Countering Violent Extremism at the U.S. Department of State, program manager of the Minerva Initiative at the Department of Defense, and fellow at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. He edited the Militant Ideology Atlas, co-authored Stealing Al Qa’ida’s Playbook, and translated Abu Bakr Naji‘s Management of Savagery. Will has designed curricula on jihadi-inspired terrorism for the FBI. He is the founder and co-editor of the noted blog, Jihadica. He too has been published in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic and elsewhere.

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Empathy – A Belated Response to Foster

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David Foster’s thoughtful “Fiction and Empathy” notes Keith Oatley’s research on reading fiction and empathy. Surely a writer’s empathy is important – Dreiser didn’t seem to like his characters, why would we? Literature often celebrates the sacred or unifies a people. Some is marginalizes the other. Surely, whether fiction leads to empathy or not is complex.

This belated riff is prompted by Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal. In a cutesy (his shtick) and dismissive review, Adam Gopnik simplifies Gottschall’s argument, using the ever popular straw man of academia. Well, no, these professional consumers of story are seldom moral exemplars. Indeed, some display an unusual inability to empathize.

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Roger Williams & the Ship of State

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Roger Williams, who represents America on the oversized Reformation Wall in Geneva, was not an easy man. Graduating from Cambridge in 1627, he was chaplain to Sir William Masham; by 1630 Archbishop Laud’s demand for oaths of loyalty reached even such clerics, and so Williams and his bride set off for New England. Fortuitously, John Wilson was just then returning to England to gather his family; that is, fortuitously for anyone but Williams. He declined the First Church of Boston post, for he “durst not officiate to an unseparated people.” In the cold winter of 1634-35, he was exiled from Salem, having already been sent from Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth. “Soul liberty” became the governing core of his Providence government – one he defended against Indian attack and the ambitions of other colonies, one he buttressed with authority from England, under both Cromwell and Charles II. He understood liberty because of his “separateness.”

At times he seems an early libertarian: he took Calvinism farther than even these steely New Englanders, having sacrificed much for their faith, were willing to go. If “moderation,” as Cotton Mather noted, characterized every page of Winthrop’s biography, “extremism” would of Williams’.

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