Day: June 7, 2002

Did you think there could never possibly be an upside to a nuclear war between India and Pakistan?

again.

Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.

First liberals — and now Christians. Seems like TTLB is becoming a haven for… well I don’t know what, but certainly not what I thought it would be.

Dean, the nice fellow over at Your Church Website, asked politely for a link, so I figured I’d oblige, as his page is (probably) unique and is at least out-of-the-ordinary for a non-practicing agnostic like me to be linking to. And I like to keep people guessing.

While I strongly suspect Dean and I might have some amusing and/or infuriating theological and philosophical debates were we to meet in person (said debates preferably to be served with a decent wine), I think I can endorse his — dare I say holy? — mission to bring good web design to Christian pages. If for no other reason, than at least from a clean-up-the-virtual-environment kinda perspective.

Hearkin unto his mission statement:

“Yes, I know most church sites are developed and maintained by volunteers. However, this doesn’t mean they have to look or feel cheap, cheezy and/or down right stupid. This website is here to ‘preach good design … to correct, rebuke and encourage with great patience and careful instruction’ on how to design church and para-church websites that are effective, fast-loading, informative, edifying and hopefully a bit fun. To do this will mean critiquing various sites in hopes of removing the splinters so we can view our sites in a new, more ‘prophet-able’ way.”

Yeeech. I was with him until that prophet-able thing. Didn’t Moses say anything about bad puns? Should be at least venal, IMHO.

Anyway, if you are looking to exorcise the demons of painfully bad design from your most holy pages, then head on over to Heal Your Church Website.

And while you’re there, don’t forget to put in a good word for the Bear. ‘Cause, you know, Pascal had a pretty good point…

Aha! Suman over at Kolkata Libertarian finally responded to the article I mentioned last week regarding India’s detailed plans for a limited war against Pakistan. After hearing about the plan last week, it sounded pretty realistic, but I wanted to hear some analysis from somebody who knows better than I. Having read Suman’s assessment, I’m convinced: Barring some unforseen and bizarre turn of events, this is what is going to happen. It just makes too much sense, from the twisted logic of the region, not to.

Suman’s money quote:

“A sense of the dramatic plays very well in the subcontinental psyche. Furious and explosive exchanges across a relatively stagnant front-line provide for much drama, but make little tactical sense in this age of modern warfare. Keep in mind, however, that the goals of this war are very different from traditional wars of aggression and defense. It’s not how much land the armies can grab, it’s how well they can soothe the jingiosm of the people back home without crippling themselves in the process. “

Whether this little adventure stays the nice, tidy limited conflict that India has planned is another question entirely.

PS – Incidentally, if my implicit recommendation wasn’t clear enough, here’s an explicit one: you should be reading Sumit if you have any interest at all in the India-Pakistan mess. And if you don’t have any interest in what may turn into a nuclear war, well then there’s just no helping you.

(via The Corner).

Dan over at Effect wrote in with some additional info on the item I posted yesterday regarding al Qaeda making contact with Islamist Kurds:

“The Ansar al-Islam connection was discussed in some detail as a small part of the Jeffrey Goldberg article on the gas attacks in Halabja, which is probably where the CSM guy is working from: [link]

This isn’t really a *shocking* revelation, not if you’ve been keeping up with all the little nodes like Fred at Rantburg [link]. And frankly, just about every little “cell” of unemployed hookah-smokers has had *some* contact with *somebody* that you can parse as an al Qaeda connection.

This is really just another example of how they glom onto every little flowering of conflict, or each flowering gravitates toward the al Qaeda blob (see Tim Blair). And how Saddam will cynically ally with anyone in order to fuck with his enemies. As a casus belli it’s pretty weak.”

Well, I’m not suggesting it’s cause to immediately freak out: I agree with Dan that it is not surprising that al Qaeda is attempting to slime their way into any possible conflict area. But the Kurds strike me as a particularly dangerous group to allow to fall into the Islamist orbit. They’ve been fighting for their own homeland for ages, and have already been screwed over by the United States at least once in recent memory (when they rose up against Saddam in the early 90’s at end of the Gulf War, and got squashed, mistakenly assuming that we were actually going to help them).

Miraculously, though, my understanding is that the main groups of Iraqi Kurds still are pretty positive towards the United States (even if they will be somewhat more cautious trusting us the next time around). And so I think a group like Ansar al-Islam bears close scrutiny. If “Kurdistan” (i.e., Northern Iraq those pieces of Turkey, Iran & Syria that the Kurds claim) were to go Islamofascist (not likely, but certainly conceivable ), that would certainly give al Qaeda another very nice base of operations.

And I think we’d all agree that would, well, suck.

My Minnesotan friend tips me off that today’s edition of Tense from Minnesota Public Radio is about weblogs. They don’t have the audio up their site yet, but if you get the actual primitive old electromagnetic waves flowing over you, catch it on air. I’ll post a link when the web audio shows up.