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Jun. 5th, 2007 10:14 amI recommend reading Fareed Zakaria's latest article in Newsweek. It's about restoring America's international reputation after the Bush administration. In short, it takes turning away from playing up fear and hysteria and turning toward confidence and optimism -- believing ourselves to be at war, when that war is inherently without end, results in a hostile posture toward the world. Talking about an "Axis of Evil" and such drives our enemies together, when we should be trying to divide them apart.
Most importantly, though, he points out that our response to terrorism cannot be one of prevention (which is impossible, due to the unfortunate fact that terrorism is easy and can always be carried out by a handful of determined & suicidal individuals) but one of resilience. While we should of course take reasonable measures to reduce terrorism, we also need to be able to, as a nation, recover from attacks when they occur. There's some evidence that bin Laden and company actually thought that blowing up the World Trade Center would cause the collpase of Western civilization. Of course, anyone who actually lives in Western civilization knows that's absurd -- our civilization has a distributed depth to it, such that it can survive a tremendous degree of damage. That is a great strength, but it must be used -- and it's not used by giving up fundamental civil liberties in response to any terrorist action. It's used by accepting that sometimes there are risks, sometimes bad things happen, and not everything can be prevented -- and that sometimes prevention comes at a very high cost.
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In totally unrelated news, I also highly recommend seeing Hot Fuzz if it's still in a theater near you. From the makers of Shaun of the Dead, it's a parody of buddy-cop action movies (albeit one that obviously comes from people who really like those movies.) And unlike many of the current parody-of-a-genre movies, it actually has a plot (albeit a somewhat ridiculous one.) It does have some somewhat excessive gore (I mean, really, it's from the makers of Shaun of the Dead) used for comic effect... but it's used so well. In any case, it's the funniest movie I've seen in quite a while.
I also saw Pirates of the Caribbean 3 recently, and was actually pretty pleased with it (it was certainly better than 2.) They did not go the direction I expected with the Pirates movies after the first one -- the plot was surprisingly epic, and the movie extremely long. But while they seemed to have half a dozen storylines all running at once, all of them did fit together and they did resolve them all by the end. The result was enjoyable, though a very different sort of movie than the first. Also, I find it interesting how the first movie was all about... um... Will Turner, yeah, that was his name, while by the end of the series it is very obviously the Captain Jack Sparrow movie. I'm guessing this decision was made after the first movie's success.
Most importantly, though, he points out that our response to terrorism cannot be one of prevention (which is impossible, due to the unfortunate fact that terrorism is easy and can always be carried out by a handful of determined & suicidal individuals) but one of resilience. While we should of course take reasonable measures to reduce terrorism, we also need to be able to, as a nation, recover from attacks when they occur. There's some evidence that bin Laden and company actually thought that blowing up the World Trade Center would cause the collpase of Western civilization. Of course, anyone who actually lives in Western civilization knows that's absurd -- our civilization has a distributed depth to it, such that it can survive a tremendous degree of damage. That is a great strength, but it must be used -- and it's not used by giving up fundamental civil liberties in response to any terrorist action. It's used by accepting that sometimes there are risks, sometimes bad things happen, and not everything can be prevented -- and that sometimes prevention comes at a very high cost.
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In totally unrelated news, I also highly recommend seeing Hot Fuzz if it's still in a theater near you. From the makers of Shaun of the Dead, it's a parody of buddy-cop action movies (albeit one that obviously comes from people who really like those movies.) And unlike many of the current parody-of-a-genre movies, it actually has a plot (albeit a somewhat ridiculous one.) It does have some somewhat excessive gore (I mean, really, it's from the makers of Shaun of the Dead) used for comic effect... but it's used so well. In any case, it's the funniest movie I've seen in quite a while.
I also saw Pirates of the Caribbean 3 recently, and was actually pretty pleased with it (it was certainly better than 2.) They did not go the direction I expected with the Pirates movies after the first one -- the plot was surprisingly epic, and the movie extremely long. But while they seemed to have half a dozen storylines all running at once, all of them did fit together and they did resolve them all by the end. The result was enjoyable, though a very different sort of movie than the first. Also, I find it interesting how the first movie was all about... um... Will Turner, yeah, that was his name, while by the end of the series it is very obviously the Captain Jack Sparrow movie. I'm guessing this decision was made after the first movie's success.
