(no subject)

Roughly since the Iraq war began, my instinct has been, "We shouldn't be there, because the real national security issues there are ones we suck at handling, but now that we've gone and invaded, we'd be screwing everyone over if we left too soon, ourselves included."  So I've not supported any of the calls for an immediate pullout.  Three-plus years on, however, I am the pundits I read are still not seeing any improvement.  Like many Americans, my earlier "you break it, you buy it" reaction is beginning to be drowned out by a loud voice saying, "Screw it -- our incompetence is only making matters worse."

Here's an editorial by someone who agrees.  Thanks to trygve for the link.

The thought that keeps coming to mind is -- if I could see that we suck too much at nation-building to handle this national-security matter appropriately, why couldn't people with actual clue or actual power do the same?  I'm certainly not saying I could do a better job conducting a war (hell, I have enough trouble managing my end of our research team) but I think I'm entitled to expect a little honest self-assessment from my administration... aww, who am I kidding.

Religion and Theseus's Paradox

Much of secular America equates "Christian" with things like "cultural conservative," "prudish," "homophobic."  This is not quite accurate, in that many churches are engaged in fierce internal debates right now about whether to modernize their teachings, to bring them more in line with modern culture.  The battle pits "reasserters" (strict constructionists of Church teaching, if you will) against "reappraisers" (loose constructionists).  I don't know how well-known this is among the nonreligious, but I read a couple of preacher-blogs regularly, and nowhere is our modern culture war more open and more bitter.  Some days ago I read some heated comments by a reasserter on one of my two favorite such blogs.  In one of these comments, he several times accused the blog's author, an ordained priest of the Episcopalian Church, of not being a Christian.  If we ignore the insult for a moment, what does he mean by that?  How much change is too much for a religion to survive?

I was put in mind of Theseus's Paradox -- many of you will be familiar with this story, I think.  Say you have a ship.  Like all ships, bits of it wear out from time to time, so you replace them.  After some time, every piece of the ship will have been replaced.  At what point, if any, does the identity of the ship change?

It is an old philosophical problem, and I don't think there are any hard-and-fast answers.  But let's imagine the ship's owner believes that each plank is integral to the ship's identity, and so chooses not to replace the boards.  Eventually, they all rot.  The material identity of the ship has remained the same (modulo the rot), but in another sense its identity has been destroyed -- because it can no longer carry people anywhere.

I tried to tell the angry reasserter about Theseus' paradox, but he never wrote back.