Saturday Links

Saturday Links: a new feature in which I will provide links to the most interesting web sites and articles that I've come across during the week. For the convenience of my fellow ALDaily readers, I've marked with *...* the articles/sites that are not linked to from that page as far as I know.

Foreign Policy

Inside the Committee that Runs the World-Foreign Policy
*The Myth of Alan Greenspan*-Foreign Policy
*Taking on Tehran*-K Pollack in Foreign Affairs
*'The Crisis':Reading the Future in Tehran*-K Pollack in NY Times
*Syria Comment*-Josh Landis, blog on Syria by a professor spending a year in Syria : there has been a lot of insight about the Syrian reaction to the Hariri assassination.
*No Beirut Spring*-spiked-online : often clear-eyed spiked goes selective, shrill, and ideological in an attempt to maintain contrarian bona fides. The selectivity and shrillness will be apparent to any reader. What I mean by ideological is that the writer indicates that current opposition in Lebanon has no right to call for Syrian pullout because those people now in the opposition at one time or another in the past had supported Syrian presence. That's just silly and seems to indicate an ideological reason for condemning pragmatism.
*The Tharwa Project*-"The Tharwa Project is an independent initiative that seeks to provide a forum for identifying the aspirations and addressing the concerns of the various ethnic and religious minorities inhabiting the Arab World." It was founded by the Syrian dissident who maintains Amarji-A Heretic's Blog. The blog is intensely personal and has lately shown the conflict between dissidence and having a family.

Philosophy

On Bullshit-Harry Frankfurt
*Dissoi Blogoi*-new Ancient Philosophy blog from a professor
*Idiocentrism*-quasi-blog by John Emerson, a disgruntled philosopher/generalist

Arts & Culture

Sign and Sight-summarizes and links to articles in the arts and culture sections of German newspapers. At the moment they have a roundup of the Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival, for you film buffs.
*Al Jadid Magazine*-"A Review of Record of Arab Culture and Arts"
*The Forager Blog*-infrequent, but smart posts on movies
*The Language Exchange*-"writing on history, language, and contemporary culture"
*The Italians: Three Centuries of Italian Art*-very cool site with the audio tour that a visitor to the museum would hear.

Für Deutsch-Leser

*Perlentaucher*-Bücher, Kultur, usw.
*Überraschung im Libanon*-taz
*Was ist dran am legendären Optimismus der Amerikaner?*- :-) tagesschau
*Unser Fundament bleiben die USA*-(The USA remains our foundation) Merkur

I may try to translate that last one because it's a very good article.