On both occasions, I had a hard time not telling the free advice givers to get lost, or something less printable along the same lines. There is no set form for grief, and no “right” way to express it.

There seems to be an expectation that, after a great loss, we will progress systematically through the well-known stages of grief. It is wrong, we are told, to jump to anger — or to wallow too long in this stage before moving toward acceptance.

But I was, and am, angry.

I presume that many a psychiatrist and New Age minister would point out that by keeping busy we avoid “healthy” grieving. To hell with that; the void left by our loss is just too deep. For now, focusing on what we do for one another is the only consolation we can find.

Compare and contrast.

Good Grief, by Amitai Etzioni

In the days since the killings in a schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pa., the tone from the grieving Amish community has been not of despair or revenge, but of forgiveness.

A relative of 13-year-old Marian Fisher, one of the children shot by Charles Carl Roberts, 32, extended an invitation to Roberts' widow to attend the girl's funeral. The Amish woman told a reporter, "It's our Christian love to show to her we have not any grudges against her."

...

Still, anyone who has ever set out on the winding road to forgiveness knows it is easier to talk the talk than to walk the walk. This week the Amish have offered all of us a superb lesson on how to make the talk and the walk intersect.

Compare and contrast.

Forgiving the unforgivable | Chicago Tribune

If you thought the belief that "the flaw inherent in western society is the bifurcation between science [including human law] and religion" is a position unique to Al Qaeda, or that it is an extremist position, then this article is for you.

In 1983, Nimeiri, aiming to counter Turabi’s growing popularity, decided to make his own Islamic claim. He hastily pushed through laws that imposed a severe version of Sharia on Sudan, including its Christian and animist south. Within eighteen months, more than fifty suspected thieves had their hands chopped off. A Coptic Christian was hanged for possessing foreign currency; poor women were flogged for selling local beer. It was exactly the kind of brutal, divisive, politically motivated Sharia that Taha had long warned against, and southerners intensified a decades-long civil war against Khartoum. Taha and other Republican Brothers, including Naim, had been jailed in advance by Nimeiri to prevent them from leading protests; their imprisonment lasted a year and a half.

Soon after Taha was released, he distributed a leaflet, on Christmas Day, 1984, titled "Either This or the Flood." "It is futile for anyone to claim that a Christian person is not adversely affected by the implementation of sharia," he wrote. "It is not enough for a citizen today merely to enjoy freedom of worship. He is entitled to the full rights of a citizen in total equality with all other citizens. The rights of southern citizens in their country are not provided for in sharia but rather in Islam at the level of fundamental Koranic revelation."

Taha, who was now in his mid-seventies, had been preparing half his life for this moment. It was central to his vision that Islamic law in its historical form, rather than in what he considered its original, authentic meaning, would be a monstrous injustice in modern society. His opposition was brave and absolute, and yet his statement reveals the limits of a philosophy that he hoped to make universal. Taha opposed secularism -- he once declared that the secular West "is not a civilization because its values are confused" -- and he could not conceive of rights outside the framework of Islam and the Koran. At the very moment that he was defending non-believers from the second-class status enshrined in Islamic law, he was extending their equal rights through a higher, better Sharia.

Abdullahi an-Naim defends Taha’s approach, saying that in the Islamic world a Turkish-style secularism will always be self-defeating. "It is an illusion to think you can sustain constitutionalism, democratization, without addressing its Islamic foundation," he said. "Because for Muslims you cannot say, 'I’m a Muslim, but—' That 'but' does not work. What unites Muslims is an idea. It is Islam as an idea. And therefore contesting that idea, I think, is going to be permanent." Whenever secular intellectuals in Muslim countries try to bypass the question of Sharia, Naim said, "they leave the high moral ground to the fundamentalists, and they lose." Invoking Islam as the highest authority for universal rights was not simply a matter of belief; it meant that Taha and his movement could stay in the game.

You should also check out God's Country?, Walter Russell Mead's article in the latest Foreign Affairs.

The difference between fundamentalists and evangelicals is not that fundamentalists are more emotional in their beliefs; it is that fundamentalists insist more fully on following their ideas to their logical conclusion.

The Moderate Martyr | George Packer | The New Yorker

Advertising is a funny business. You get to help shape the personalities of huge companies. Most often it’s for cellphone service or credit cards or fast food or paper towels. Rarely are you faced with whether you “believe” in a product or service.

This was different. This was serious.

I guess, looking at it now, it's just advertising. It’s become mere marketing -- perhaps it always was -- instead of a genuine attempt to engage the public in the debate or a corporate rallying cry to change the paradigm. Maybe I’m naïve.

Beyond Propaganda

Decius wrote:

The August 22nd meme was going around at Defcon.

Bernard Lewis wrote:

A passage from the Ayatollah Khomeini, quoted in an 11th-grade Iranian schoolbook, is revealing. "I am decisively announcing to the whole world that if the world-devourers [i.e., the infidel powers] wish to stand against our religion, we will stand against their whole world and will not cease until the annihilation of all them. Either we all become free, or we will go to the greater freedom which is martyrdom. Either we shake one another's hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours."

Today, Bush says:

This nation is at war with Islamic fascists.

There are people that still plot and people who want to harm us for what we believe in. It is a mistake to believe there is no threat to the United States of America.

Does Bush have something in store?

Unbelievable. AOL released a file containing the search engine queries of over 500,000 users during a three month period. It's being mirrored all over.

Here is a screenshot of the download page before it was taken down, complete with a spelling error.. "ananomized"

This will probably be a watershed moment for Internet privacy.

Link to AOL data release

Both men, of course, remain innocent until proven guilty. But one can only imagine that these digital breadcrumbs — meaningless as personal debris, but more damning when they suddenly draw public attention — became a source of some anxiety for them, particularly as their computer equipment was seized and the ability to delete accounts, remove images and otherwise erase online legacies was cut off.

It's something to keep in mind not just for those who plan on doing a little hacking here and there, but for an entire booty-shaking, blog-bleating, MySpace generation that might one day have reason to worry or wonder, years from now, whether some faraway cache or archive holds backups of their cyber-indiscretions.

"Our tracks through the digital sand are eternal."

Lest We Regret Our Digital Bread Crumbs

If we speak of the fear of emancipation from the fear-regime, we put the whole situation into a single phrase; fear regarding ourselves now taking the place of the ancient fear of the enemy.

...

We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built — unless, indeed, we which for dangerous reactions against commonwealths, fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood.

...

Let me illustrate my idea more concretely. There is nothing to make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should toil and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once for all are such, and we can stand it. But that so many men, by mere accidents of birth and opportunity, should have a life of nothing else but toil and pain and hardness and inferiority imposed upon them, should have no vacation, while others natively no more deserving never get any taste of this campaigning life at all, — this is capable of arousing indignation in reflective minds. It may end by seeming shameful to all of us that some of us have nothing but campaigning, and others nothing but unmanly ease. If now — and this is my idea — there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.

... It is but a question of time, of skilful propogandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities.

The conceptions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion, and universal responsibility, which universal military duty is now teaching European nations, will remain a permanent acquisition when the last ammunition has been used in the fireworks that celebrate the final peace.

What if there was a non-military draft into the Long War of Ideas?

Is that not jihad?

William James: The Moral Equivalent of War

In the 21st century, the "scene" transcends the concepts of individual and organization.

This book is about the organization man. If the term is vague, it is because I can think of no other way to describe the people I am talking about. They are not the workers, nor are they the white-collar people in the usual, clerk sense of the word. These people only work for The Organization. The ones I am talking about belong to it as well. They are the ones of our middle class who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life, and it is they who are the mind and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions. Only a few are top managers or ever will be. In a system that makes such hazy terminology as "junior executive" psychologically necessary, they are of the staff as much as the line, and most are destined to live poised in a middle area that still awaits a satisfactory euphemism. But they are the dominant members of our society nonetheless. They have not joined together into a recognizable elite--our country does not stand still long enough for that--but it is from their ranks that are coming most of the first and second echelons of our leadership, and it is their values which will set the American temper.

I am going to call it a Social Ethic. With reason it could be called an organization ethic, or a bureaucratic ethic; more than anything else it rationalizes the organization's demands for fealty and gives those who offer it wholeheartedly a sense of dedication in doing so--in extremis, you might say, it converts what would seem in other times a bill of no rights into a restatement of individualism.

But there is a real moral imperative behind it, and whether one inclines to its beliefs or not he must acknowledge that this moral basis, not mere expediency, is the source of its power. Nor is it simply an opiate for those who must work in big organizations. The search for a secular faith that it represents can be found throughout our society--and among those who swear they would never set foot in a corporation or a government bureau. Though it has its greatest applicability to the organization man, its ideological underpinnings have been provided not by the organization man but by intellectuals he knows little of and toward whom, indeed, he tends to be rather suspicious.

Let me now define my terms. By social ethic I mean that contemporary body of thought which makes morally legitimate the pressures of society against the individual. Its major propositions are three: a belief in the group as the source of creativity; a belief in "belongingness" as the ultimate need of the individual; and a belief in the application of science to achieve the belongingness.

An ideal of individualism which denies the obligations of man to others is manifestly impossible in a society such as ours, and it is a credit to our wisdom that while we preached it, we never fully practiced it.... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

The Organization Man, by William Whyte

This article seems likely to provoke discussion.

In a nutshell: it sure looks like everything is going to hell, but it's really going to be coming up roses here in a little while. (Maybe.)

What the world has now is new cities with young populations and old cities with old populations. How the dialogue between them plays out will determine much of the nature of the next half century. The convergence of the two major trends, globalization and rampant urbanization, means that all cities are effectively one city now.

It's one city, and it's a Temporary Autonomous Zone.

The TAZ by its very nature seizes every available means to realize itself--it will come to life whether in a cave or an L-5 Space City--but above all it will live, now, or as soon as possible, in however suspect or ramshackle a form, spontaneously, without regard for ideology or even anti-ideology.

Having said that, while we're on the religion tip:

"Pentecostalism is ... the first major world religion to have grown up almost entirely in the soil of the modern urban slum” and “since 1970, and largely because of its appeal to slum women and its reputation for being colour-blind, [Pentecostalism] has been growing into what is arguably the largest self-organized movement of urban poor people on the planet."

In Gibson's version of the Sprawl, most people are poor, but I don't remember anything about everyone being deeply religious.

City Planet, by Stewart Brand